


in action how like an angel

by Sciosa



Series: a little lower than the angels [1]
Category: Abrahamic Religions, Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Religious, Gen, POV Second Person, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, but it takes A While for the protagonist's name to come up, canon-typical violence but like... with smiting, chara ISN'T here because angels take up a lot of room in a person, divine gore?, frisk is a good kid who deserves better, frisk is here but angels take up a lot of room in a person, game dialogue appears a lot in the early chapters, godspeed, gratuitous use of the kjv bible, idk how to describe this aspect of the thing, in the end it took us fifteen chapters to get a name for our protagonist, kind of a matryoshka doll of identities, listen lovecraftian angels are my jam and nobody can stop me, so that's the kind of thing you're signing up for if you read this i guess, the ancient/innocent one-two punch, the author doesn't understand math and this is increasingly a problem, this is a fic relevant probably only to my very specific interests, this is not really Reader-fic to be clear so it's not going in those tags, this will take a little bit to get going but will diverge from canon events, uh graphic depictions of violence against... lovecraftian... angels?, video game mechanics as interpreted by a billion-year-old angel, who the fuck knows tbh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2019-03-06
Packaged: 2019-08-08 14:01:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 20
Words: 67,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16430789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sciosa/pseuds/Sciosa
Summary: You are an angel. Not a metaphorical, Delta Rune "angel"-- although you are, probably, that too-- but a literal, celestial, divinely-created angel. Of course, the monsters were probably hoping for an avenging seraph with a heavenly blade, or maybe a beautiful and compassionate malakh, or any kind of angel that was designed to descend to Earth in the first place.Youare an ophan-- an analyst of the Divine Plan, the Throne and the Chariot, singing praise Above and serving as the filter between Unknowable Divine and Finite Existence; a vast interlocking array of wheels-within-wheels-within-wings, consumed by pale blue fire and lit from within by innumerable golden eyes, awesome and terrible to behold-- squished into a ten-year-old human with a striped sweater and an unfortunate haircut.If this was in the Plan, you feel like you should have been notified.





	1. it’s a cold and it’s a broken

**Author's Note:**

> Whoo boy, here we go.
> 
> Enjoy this thing tailored to my very specific interests in Undertale, messianic narratives, prophecy, horrifying angels, subsumed mythology, identity, and learning what it means to be a person.
> 
> Tentatively plotted out at 26 chapters for this first installment, with-- fuck me-- _five to six_ future installments when this wraps up. Don't expect a schedule, although I've got the first six chapters "done" so hopefully the pace will be manageable.

I AM

You bask in the Presence of Above, your wheels unlocked and spinning in precisely calculated whorls to counterpoint the low, steady song of angels at rest. You finish analyzing the piece of the Divine Plan you received from the choirs of chayot a few notes of song ago and it disperses through your rotations to the lower choirs for implementation. You file away a translucent copy in your matrix for archiving, a handful of your golden eyes unblinking within you to trace the (new) familiar pattern into place. Satisfied with your work, you quickly align all your rings and straighten your matrix for the next element of the Plan.

Before it can arrive, you abruptly receive the instructions for the next iteration of several important and irregular probabilities, which you had almost forgotten were in the Plan. They have been percolating Above for a disconcertingly long time-- _you_ are not disconcerted, but you feel that the several spans of song it has taken to reach this point could be _described_ as disconcerting-- and for several songs the Plan has simply stepped around them, creating whirls of inattention that you are unequipped to assess. Now the new elements unspool within you in fractals, pressing your rings out of alignment with their urgency. You fling your many pale wings out to balance yourself against the sudden unexpected force, drawing the attention of your nearest choirmate, who spins a little further away to avoid tangling their wings in yours. They hum a bemused tone, but you cannot respond. There is no room within you, with this frantic fraction of the Plan filling you with elaborate calculations, its fractals dotted by strange jumps and skips and absences that you are not certain how to analyse, to fill yourself with song and--

A L L E L U I A

You feel rings of opalescent eyes shift to look at you, a ripple of confusion spreading through the ranks, when you do not join the chorus of the praising ophanim.

You realize with perfect clarity, too late to do anything else, that this is a mistake.

You  
        F  
            A  
                L  
                    L

You are aware, beyond the rending ache of absence in your core where once so recently dwelt the Presence of Above, of angels scattering in your wake; lamentations among the cherubim, rattling sabers among the seraphim, whispers and concerns between the bene elohim and the malakhim, the ringing silence of the chayot ha qadesh _hesitating_. It has been a long time-- many, many scores of songs-- since anyone has fallen.

You seem to be falling to Earth.

This is confusing. The fallen do not reside on Earth. You are not certain where they reside-- somewhere that Above does not see fit to show you-- but surely you should be falling _there_.

You are _definitely_ falling to Earth.

You cannot exist on Earth. More accurately, you can exist on Earth but Earth cannot endure your existence-- if you fall to it unclothed in flesh, it will fall within your rings and the seas will boil and the land will shatter, and anyone who survives that will be stricken blind and deaf by your shining eyes and eternal song as the fabric of reality cracks and shears open. This is not an acceptable outcome. Earth is dear to Above-- the life it sustains is dearer still-- and you would sooner crack open your being and extinguish yourself in a nascent star than sacrifice it.

You hear, distantly--

A L L E L U I A

\-- a scream.

_a mistake a mistake a mistake a mistake help me help me help me help--_

It is so, so small; it is falling.

A ruby red fractal blooms inside you.

You fold yourself up as small as you can, spinning rings into tight configurations, shuttering your golden eyes, inhaling your wreath and crown of glittering cold flame, wrapping your wings around yourself, spooling yourself into a tiny, dense interlocked sphere of--

A L L E L U I A

\-- determination.

You fall into the child.

The child falls into the mountain.

Glory, glory, alleluia.

Be thou not afraid.


	2. a secret chord

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _wake up_

You are blind.

You try to open your unnumbered eyes-- they are only a piece of your perception, but it seems like the simplest solution-- but only two of them respond. This is such an unfathomably small number that you can barely perceive it. A thin strip of deep yellow is all that that you see. You have no concept of what it might be. Without your full range of vision you cannot see the tapestry of its existence, the interconnections that place it within the Divine Plan. It might be another of your golden eyes, disconnected from your whole. It might be the surface of a young star. It might be anything. 

You feel strange. Constrained. You cannot feel the edges of your rings, much less unlock them and set them back in motion. Your wings are cramped and aching, but you cannot seem to outstretch them. Something in you pulses weakly.

Your divine fire is fading within you.

Something is wrong.

_breathe_

That is not the Presence of Above.

Perhaps it is one of the fallen.

_i fell i’m dying i have to breathe_

Dying?

_i don’t want to die please please help_

You struggle to unravel slowly, feel something scrape and flutter inside your locked rings that is not normally there. You need it to stop, you need to concentrate, it is moving inside you and you are _so empty_ , no Presence, no song of Above, nothing but your own fast-fading fire, you have been _scoured_ , you are _bereft_. You suppress the fluttering thing, and on some instinct from within the deepest archives in your matrix, from Plans before Time, you wrap the red fractal around it softly and graft it into a new-made nest in the empty space at your center where so recently you carried the Presence of Above.

It is like putting a candle in the ashes of a bonfire.

Something is _wrong_.

The captured thing throbs, and sweet-scented breath fills the lungs that you are suddenly aware you possess.

You remember--

scream _help me_ determination

\-- that you are inside a human child.

Oh.

These must be the human child’s eyes.

It must be the human child’s soul that you are holding. You wrap the red fractal around it more firmly, spinning woven spirals of determination around it. Souls are very small and very precious. You must be very careful or the human child will be destroyed.

You wish you had spent more time with the hashmallim. Souls are really their purview, and you have never touched one before, though you know the shapes and songs.

You press the hum of your song closer to the human’s soul, tuned to a soothing thrum that is as close as your song approaches to that of Above-- **Be thou not afraid, for I am with thee.**

If you had descended to Earth unclothed in flesh, your song would have rent and ruined every real thing it touched--even now, if you could outstretch yourself, if you could spin out into your normal form and orientation, you might burst out of this small human flesh and the Earth and all matter and law in the vicinity would split open like rotten fruit and collapse into featureless non-space deeper than any void-- but souls are made of more resonant material. Through the protective matrix of the red fractal you hear it mimic you imperfectly, in the way of mortal things.

_not afraid with thee_

You still cannot open all of your eyes, and you do not dare spin open even if you could with this fragile thing within you. But your divine fire glows brighter, revitalized with the new life filling the human child’s body. You tie the fire into that part of the human child’s life-- it will feed the lungs, and some of the other things inside it, the life things that must happen all the time. Fire is good at these things. It burns cold and bright within you, flush with breath and blood and neural pulses.

You wonder how the eshim and bene elohim do this all the time. There are so many pieces to keep track of.

You factor your strangely muffled awareness down several times, smaller and smaller, until you can sense the weight of the human child’s limp limbs, feel something slightly soft beneath it-- the yellow thing?-- which is doing very little to mitigate an unpleasant, stinging heat beneath its skin. You consider this. You do not know what it is supposed to feel like, embodiment, enrobing yourself in mortal flesh. It is not a thing that ophanim ever have cause to do. Perhaps this is correct.

Trying to move the human child’s limbs is not at all like spinning and interlocking the wheels of your own being. Among other things, you have sharp and rigid edges, within which most of your less tangible components reside; the human child seems to have sharp and rigid interiors, some of which are currently making an effort to become exterior by puncturing its thin, troublingly opaque skin.

This seems, to you, as if it might not be ideal.

Above designed these creatures to work in very specific ways. You sift through your archive of fractals, unwinding them in neat spirals around the gently shivering soul, until you find the correct element of the Plan.

Oh. No, this is not how it is intended to function. It must have been broken in the fall.

You study the Plan for an infinitesimal moment-- it is important to present the Divine Plan without flaw-- and then gather the fractal and press it out beyond your locked and nested wheels. For a moment the lines and angles of the Plan sear into your rings, limned in colorless holy light, and you worry that it will not permeate your shell-- you know that some of the lower choirs are able to repair errors in the mortal frame more manually but you have never needed to know how it is done-- but you feel something shift and the Plan sinks out into physical reality, into the human child’s tissue, restoring all to its proper position, weaving what is broken back into a whole. The sub-dermal ache and itch of broken bones fades quickly, though the human child’s body is still uncomfortably warm. According to the Plan, this is its intended temperature. You stoke your divine fire a little higher and enjoy the chill of pale blue flame within you.

… something is wrong.

_not afraid i am with thee_

“What’s taking so lo-- oh! Howdy there, friend!” says a thin, sharp voice.

You raise the human child’s head-- yours, you suppose, for now-- and are slightly startled to find that beyond the patch of yellow (flowers, you think, skimming through all the elements of the Plan you contain about Earth) is nothing but darkness. You rotate your head in as many directions as it can manage-- not many-- but do not recognize anything that might have a voice.

“Down here, silly!” it says again, and this time you are able to follow the sound with your head until your two weak eyes are pointed at it.

“That’s right!” says the pale face embedded in the gently swaying head of a yellow-petalled almost-goatweed, “I’m Flowey! Flowey the Flower!”


	3. you don't really care for music

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _in this world, it's--_

“Golly, you must have taken a tumble!” says the flower, smiling.

This is not right. There is nothing about this in the Plan. Plants communicate through root networks and electromagnetic pulses and pollen exchanges, with simple green songs of one or two long repeated tones. They do not speak in the Tongues of Babel. They do not have the necessary elements for smiling. They do not sway and bobble in the absence of any air currents to move them.

Also, while you’re listing inaccuracies, _hypericum perforatum_ is a five-petalled flower.

“Hmmm… you’re new to the Underground, aren’tcha? Someone ought to teach you how things work around here!”

You can hear a song, muffled by the new limits on your senses-- a strange, scraping, _hollow_ thing that claws at the shell of your interlocked wheels, too complex and… _wounded_ to belong to the flower. (But you can see nothing else that it might belong to. Your record of Earth’s Plan is from The Beginning-- perhaps it has changed. But why would you not know? How long were you falling?) 

The human’s rudimentary electrical system attempts to reinterpret the tattered song as a terrestrial sound, and only accomplishes a simple melody picked out in upbeat, discordant tones. Even the relatively simple soul of the human child, tucked away inside you deeply enough that it wouldn’t be able to engage in a true chorus, shivers away from the instinctive impulse to reflect what it hears; your own song skips up several tempos and adopts a colder, dissonant tone in a clear rejection. But the (flower’s?) song continues. There are clearly whole passages missing. You wonder if it can hear your song at all.

You watch the flower carefully, as well as you can with the human’s so-limited sight, and try to rotate your limbs-- four? Four linear, jointed limbs, how inconvenient, how are you to protect the vulnerable pieces of the mortal frame with these-- into an upright position. Before you can really make progress on this idea, you feel the flower’s song spike, and the human soul lurches abruptly towards it.

_afraid_

It is still wrapped in the red fractal and bound to the core of your being, it cannot be taken away from you, but an inexorable _pressure_ pulls the soul away, forward, _out_ of the material shell that shields you both. You scramble to press most of your wheels and eyes and wings more firmly into the human body-- if you are dragged out now, even compressed and interlocked as you are, you will do irreparable damage to this layer of reality. But the ghost of your divine form materializes all the same, in translucent golden rings, diaphanous wings mantled out from the sphere at non-euclidean angles, tongues of blue flame pressing frantically through the seams of your insubstantial wheels and reaching for the enemy, locked around the human’s red and vulnerable soul as it is drawn forth for ~~war~~ an encounter.

It has been so, so long since you ~~went to war~~ engaged in hostile action.

You had hoped you never would again.

 _afraid be not afraid be not with thee with thee with thee,_ the soul hums, urgent, as though it senses your distress. It is so fragile, so vulnerable. Your wheels will not protect it like this, it is the most tangible thing within your matrix, you have to protect it. You _must_. The red fractal blooms with color, a lattice of undiluted energy obscuring the soul briefly, but outside of your essential core you are so limited, you had to make yourself so _small_ \--

“Wh- what the heck is _that_?!” the flower demands, face warping rapidly through a series of expressions you do not have enough context to parse.

You can hear the whine and creak of reality bending uneasily around even this thin manifestation of your presence. Yes, _yes_ , that will make it stop-- the soul cannot be harmed if the threat does not exist. You will _shatter_ the flower, and all it touches, if you must. You press fingers of flame more firmly into the ghost of your form and they catch into a blaze, spinning in unearthly eddies, casting the shadows of your unmoving rings out over the bed of yellow flowers. Wherever the shadows fall, reality splinters like glass under pressure. Buried in the flowers, something red and glittering pulses through the thin fractures. The flower’s bobbing head stills, tilting at an oblique angle as the world groans and very slightly _twists_ \-- the temperature surrounding you plummets rapidly, flowers chilling into brittle crystal in slowly-spreading rings around the human child as reality ripples in response to the dropped stone of your presence. The darkness develops depth, and in that depth many distant eyes snap open. Alarm and horror fills the flower’s face.

Good.

“Hey! Stop that! This isn’t funny!” it shrieks, shrill, all pretense of pleasant cheer abandoned.

You cannot stop. You must _protect_.

 _be thou not for i am not afraid_ , sings the soul, and-- wait. Nothing is wrong.

 **In the multitude of my thoughts, thy consolation hath brought me great joy** , you hum, pressing the Word close to the soul, and hear it echo back _joy joy joy_. The flower cowers as your song resonates through the human’s soul, building in volume and in triumphant delight as the soul shines. The soul is seated in your matrix; even now, exposed, it lies within the shadow of your wheels. You cannot imagine why you were afraid. 

Afraid? No. No, you were… no. That is a mortal thing. You were not afraid. You were… assessing. 

You are cold divine purpose, emboldened by a resolute red soul. All things are within your power. It does not matter that you cannot see the flower’s Plan and ties-- you will unravel it by more direct means, and then it will be silent, and then all manner of thing shall be well.

And then there is a stranger’s light, and heat, and a mote of flame strikes the flower and throws it down. The soul hums a final sighing tone and returns to its nest within you. It brings the afterimage of your divine form with it, and reality shudders and snaps back into place.

“What a terrible creature, torturing such a poor, innocent youth…” says another voice.

You turn your head as well as you can-- evidently it was not among the unknowable motives of Above to permit His Children to swivel their heads in a complete circle, which is causing you some inconvenience and not a little bafflement; you are _certain_ the Plan contains a creature which can do so, why would this feature _not_ be included in humans-- and after a moment a familiar shape shuffles into view.

No, you are being inaccurate. The basic construction is familiar. The specific shape is not familiar. It is a tall, pale creature of vaguely mammalian-- perhaps caprinaen-- construction, with what you cautiously interpret as a maternal temperament. It has an unfamiliar ~~if comforting~~ song, which you can _just_ hear echoing in the human’s soul through the layers of flesh and bone and your own existence, and you would recognize any song you had encountered before. This individual is not known to you. Very few individuals are known to you. You are an ophan. You do not socialize.

You _analyse_. You _archive_. You _praise_.

You _destroy the Children of Lilith_.

 _consolation consolation_ , the soul sings uneasily, _in the multitudes great joy_.

“Ah, do not be afraid, my child,” says the monster. “I am Toriel, caretaker of the Ruins.”

You doubt that one of the lilim is the caretaker of anything, and you are certainly _not_ the child of a lilit-- nor, indeed, is the human child. However, your attempt to make this clear expresses itself not as a strident, undulating song echoing your Creator Above and promising the peace of oblivion, but as a strange, hoarse keening sound. Possibly the human child’s throat is inadequate to express your voice. … possibly you have misunderstood how the larynx works. Either way, the monster lifts one hand to its maw, dilating its eyes, and inhales sharply. The Children of Lilith are too manifold and varied to interpret this action adequately. Likely it is a threat of some kind.

You have never slain a lilit, and you ~~dread~~ dislike the practice of war even when it is within your power and authority, but you are familiar with the essentials. A seraph would be better equipped-- they can exist in physical reality without destroying it, at least for a short time, and every element of their forms are designed to reave-- but you understand the Command of Above. You have never slain a lilit. A lilit has crossed your path. It is your obligation to destroy it. It is the obligation of all angels.

(Even the fallen would-- would they? ~~You~~ \--)

 ~~In the War~~ In a conventional battle, your only weapon as an ophan is your own essence, the divine fire that catalyzes and sustains you. It will be more than adequate to unmake a Child of Lilith, a creature of dust untouched by the Presence of Above. A single touch would suffice, if you were made for ~~war~~ action, but as you are ~~out of practice~~ an ophan it is likely to be a more protracted process. This is not your singular purpose, and it will require temporarily rewiring your own central matrix to achieve the necessary ~~intent to harm~~ focus, but at least you are uniquely positioned among the ophanim to perform this obligation. You are not certain your choirmates could accomplish it.

~~Your neighbor’s wings burst into an inchoate cloud of silvery fragments, rings collapsing out of synchronization, glittering eyes rapidly dimming. The enemy smashes through your choirmate as if they were no more substantial, no more alive, than ice crystals cooling on the new planet’s chaotic surface, and _keeps coming_. You swivel every one of your eyes towards the attacking angel-- a tower of ruby-red flame flexing in mirrored spirals around a cracked crystal core, _you can see the seams_ \-- and you siphon a few dozen more eyes abruptly into existence with pure will, fling them out into your crown of pale fire to spin and weave, scanning the battlefield for your allies, your _superiors_. But nobody comes; only the enemy and your neighbor’s scattering remains. You suppress every instinct you have to protect and instead _open your rings_ , expose your essential nature, your interwoven matrices, the seat of the Presence of Above in you. Open and vulnerable, you look upon the Enemy and _Know Him_ \--~~

_consolation_ , the soul sings, over and over again. You think it may have been singing it for some time. You cannot remember.

You try again, vainly, to open your eyes. The human child’s dim pair register the lilit approaching with quick caution, its robe sweeping through flowers; none of your own golden eyes respond. You still cannot unravel the knot you have made of yourself in order to fit inside the human child.

Your fire should be strong enough, even without altering your matrix, to begin unraveling the Child of Lilith at a superficial level, _if you could manifest it_. You are not certain that it would be safe to do so, not with the way physical existence reacted to the shadow of your presence.

You are not certain that you _could_ manifest it if it was safe to do so, while you are so small and constrained.

The monster kneels close to your nearly-prostrate mortal form and extends one hand. You try to manifest divine flame anyway. 

Nothing happens.

The monster’s hand touches the human child’s head.

Similarly, nothing happens.

“My child, what is wrong? You do not seem to be injured… do you not feel well?”

You do not feel anything. You are an angel. You are not the monster’s child. You will not permit this inaccuracy to continue.

You attempt to summon a Tongue of Babel into the human child’s mouth this time, but all you accomplish is an incoherent mush of vaguely language-adjacent sounds.

“Oh my,” says the monster, and you feel maternal green energy drift down into your host’s scalp through careful fingers, pointlessly seeking failures in your perfect, untarnished vessel. Your matrix acquires sharp, unfamiliar angles along which your divine fire courses like pale and ruinous venom, as if you might need to resist the lilit’s magic, burn it out of your edges and corners, but of course the monster does not know that you are here. The magic touches only the human child, and even then it does not reach the soul.

 _in thy thoughts multitudes multitudes?_ the human’s soul whispers, thrumming with cautious appreciation at the dim echo of the monster’s magic that it senses through your protective layers.

 **Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful,** you hiss. But the red hum of the soul remains unsubdued, now pressing _friends faithful kisses_ out at you with unchastened, uncompromising compassion. You have never felt anything like it. So small an ember; yet it warms every layer of your existence. You close the human child’s eyes and tuck yourself tighter around the soul, your threat-sharp angles smoothing gradually into more familiar whorls.

“Ah. Perhaps you simply need rest. Forgive me-- you are the first human to come here in a long while. Come, my child,” the monster says, fitting its hands beneath the human child’s frame. You flail your frustrating, limited limbs uselessly for a moment, but the monster is undeterred and simply adjusts its grip to better constrain you. It cradles you ~~gently~~ against its robe. 

“This way. I will bring you through the catacombs.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Flowey. Didn't even get to do his friendliness pellets speech. :(


	4. what's really going on below

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _a cotton heart and a button eye_

The monster carries you beyond a threshold and you sense sudden light behind the human child’s closed eyes. You open them as quickly as you can, a startled noise growing in the human child’s mouth without your attention or consent. 

There is a building-- brick walls, smooth stone floors, passageways and windows beyond which you can only see blackness-- inside the mountain.

The monster does not find it remarkable, and simply walks towards stairs that sweep up into looming stone structures. Within you, the human soul turns its attention to the ruins-- the weight and age of them-- and blooms with warm, red determination. Something inside you _sparks_ , though you can find no irregularities in your divine fire.

 _faithful friends,_ it assures you, _the kisses faithful_.

You are less convinced.

“Welcome to your new home, innocent one,” says the monster, carrying you into the ~~Hall~~ dimly lit ruins. Your body’s weak eyes can barely perceive the closed doors that lie ahead, the surface marred by dark splotches of some unfamiliar lilim symbol pressed into the stone. 

“Allow me to educate you in the operation of the Ruins,” it continues, walking in a rigid pattern across tiles that _click_ beneath its bare feet. “The Ruins are full of puzzles-- ancient fusions between diversions and doorkeys.”

It pauses for a moment in front of a wall, humming to itself, before shifting you into one arm-- the human child’s muscles tense with animal reflex at the precariousness of its position, which is an instinct that you are… grateful to find the mortal flesh retains-- to pull a lever down. From the corner of your eyes, you see the large stone doors slide away within the wall.

“One must solve them to move from room to room. Please adjust yourself to the sight of them,” the monster adds.

It carries you through the ruins, describing the trick to the next puzzle as it proceeds. They do not seem difficult. You spool through the Plan in your rings, looking for anything Divine that is even remotely as simple as these monstrous things. You find nothing that could be resolved-- or even _understood_ \-- with anything less than the multidimensional equations that make up the fractals suspended around your core in clouds of potential and analysis, and much that requires _more_ effort than simply spinning it through yourself. You are not certain how these puzzles are intended to be either diverting or confounding.

The soul within you is more intrigued, and hums cheery, _friends are kisses_ , at you with relentless optimism.

“Ah,” the monster says, and you feel yourself being lowered to the ground, balanced on the human child’s tiny feet. You wobble-- gravity is such an inconvenience-- and it places one hand against the human child’s back. “I hope you are not too tired. There is something you must do before we move on.”

There is a construct of some kind, slightly taller than the human child, suspended on a wooden rack in front of you.

“As a human living in the underground, monsters may attack you,” it says, and you feel the soul shiver and drop, its steady string of encouragement faltering. “You will need to be prepared for this situation.”

Your fractals bloom briefly golden with the satisfaction that naturally accompanies correct analysis as the monster continues speaking. Of course the human child is endangered here. This is a pit of lilim. All human children are endangered by lilim. This is within the framework of the Plan. Of course, you will not permit the human child to _come to harm_ , but it is to be expected that lilim will attack them.

The soul whispers, _wound friends_ , with dull, uncertain reluctance. You hesitate. Before you can decide how to respond, the soul brightens perceptibly and directs your attention outwards, back to the monster.

“-- strike up a friendly conversation. Stall for time. I will come to resolve the conflict,” it is saying, peering down at you with ~~gentle concern~~ an unreadable expression. Its mouth curls, and it gestures at the fabric-and-wood construct with one hand. “Practice talking to the dummy.”

As soon as you pull the human child’s eyes into focus on the construct, the soul trembles inside you and is drawn out once more, the dim ghost of you still locked around it. Distantly, you hear the lilit make a sound of some kind, but with the soul exposed your whole attention is on the unexpected threat of the dummy. Another lilit? How did this escape your attention? _You should know them_.

You strain to perceive the weave of the Plan that interpenetrates all, but as before your own eyes remain closed and all the human child’s eyes see is mortal reality.

Or-- no. That is not mortal reality. You can still _see_ mortal reality, in the human child’s peripheral vision, but at the front of your attention it fades into a dark grid, illuminating the threat and suspending-- _choices_ , you think, or _actions_. They little resembles the latticed knots of appointed actions in the Plan, but they have a similar… _tone_.

Nothing indicates what the intended actions are. Surely you are not intended to perform them _all_? Some are contradictory. FIGHT and MERCY are surely opposed actions. But why would there be _unintended actions_ presented?

You cannot be expected to _choose_.

 _kisses,_ the soul thrums, a visible pulse of warm red through your translucent shell.

You flicker obediently through the actions searching for the soul’s desire, most of your attention still on the unmoving lilit-dummy, but find nothing appropriate.

 _friends friends!_ the soul insists, and darts forward of its own volition to hover over TALK, dragging your echo with it.

You had not been aware that it could move in this state.

 _faithful the friends! kisses the friends!_ it sings, spinning in rapturous circles next to the action.

You are not at all convinced that this action is _wise_ , but it is the soul’s desire. Human souls are beloved; they are permitted to make choices. If not intended, the action is now nevertheless _chosen_. You concentrate on the Tongue of Babel that the monster has been using, and on the tongue and teeth and larynx in the human child’s body. It will not well reflect your songs, and the Tongues of Babel have no sounds that would mimic you, but the Word is flexible. It should fit in the human child’s mouth.

“Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm,” you say, carefully, coordinating tongue and air and your own Knowledge of the Word. Beneath the thin human voice, that songless breath, the Word resonates with divine authority enough that there is a faint tremor in the space between atoms.

Instantly the soul is released from the lilit-dummy’s grasp and falls back within its skin as mortal reality fades back into view.

“Ah,” says the monster- ~~mother~~ goat behind you. “That is… good. You are… very good.”

The soul glows with pleasure within you. You watch the lilit-dummy for any signs of treachery, though with the soul’s delight spilling through you the danger seems less urgent. In any case, the construct does not move or interact in any way-- perhaps it is crippled by its heritage. On the wall before you, the monster-goat’s shadow rises slowly to its full height, and you feel a subtle shift in the air as one hand hovers over the human child’s head for a moment. It does not touch, this time.

“If you are feeling better,” the monster says, slowly, “Perhaps it would do you good to walk a little ways. Follow me to the next room and we will continue on.”

And then it leaves, drifting through the open doorway quickly. You focus on the precarious balance that the human child’s skinny legs are currently accomplishing in cooperation with the laws of gravity and feel a slight champagne-golden satisfaction shimmer through your fractals when the body does not immediately collapse. You should have time to assess the Plan before attempting to move.

You shuffle through a handful of archived elements while the soul hums, _kisses friends kisses friends_ , lazily to itself, glowing brightly enough in its nest to spread a flush of rosy pleasure reflecting through the colorless crystal of your matrix. You cannot agree, though you are… satisfied that it is pleased with its choice. It is growing more active than you expected it to be-- the Presence of Above would move in you perhaps once in a dozen songs, and then only if you had erred-- but then it is in the nature of mortal things, so temporary, to flick through their lives with astonishing speed. Perhaps the soul’s increasing exuberance is a consequence of that.

The Plan indicates that human children-- well, humans at all life stages, barring exceptions of age and ailment-- ambulate by way of a series of controlled falls, briefly surrendering their weight to gravity between applications of their perilously thin limbs. This seems… suboptimal. But you are not the Creator Above, and neither are you one of the erelim, which might be able to make a judgement about the practical efficacy of this interpretation of the Plan. If this is what the Plan indicates-- and through the lens filter of yourself, it is-- then that is simply so.

It would be much, much easier to simply translocate the human child’s body to the appropriate location. Unfortunately, this will not be possible ~~unless~~ until you are able to open your true eyes and perceive the weaves and tangles of reality more clearly.

 _Walking_ it is.

You could, of course, retreat. You are unable to perform the one function remaining to you-- to destroy lilim-- so there is little purpose in lingering in their nest. But there is nothing of immediate use to you in the rooms that you have already passed. The human child’s fall into the mountain was very long, and you do not think that its body has the necessary capabilities to climb out the same way, even with your assistance. If you could translocate, yes. But not using mortal means.

You will proceed into the mountain. There are doubtless other exits, more suited to the human child’s form. You will find one of them.

~~And then what will you do-- you are Fallen, you are _nothing_ \--~~

A few false starts-- catastrophe prevented by the body’s instincts where your own skill fails-- notwithstanding, you carefully maneuver the human child’s body beyond the threshold. This requires you to turn your back on the lilit-dummy, which the soul predictably does not find alarming in the least. Your wheels grind together slightly as you instinctively try to lock them tighter, more protectively, despite the fact that they are already thoroughly enclosed-- but nothing happens. You are unimpeded.

“There is another puzzle in this room…” the monster says, ~~smiling~~ as though the linear time it has taken you to accomplish this walk is of no note. “I wonder if you can solve it?”

You are an ophan. This is ridiculous question.

Also, you do not see a puzzle. You see an empty room with a displeasing asymmetrical floor tile pattern. None of them look like they might click. You continue further into the ruins without comment, and the monster glides serenely ahead of you as if nothing is amiss. You are not sufficiently familiar with the lilim to know if this is typical behaviour. It does not seem like typical behaviour. The murder of human children seems like typical behaviour.

There is a sheet of metal grafted to the wall. It has the trace echo of a song around its edges, red and fractured, perhaps a remnant of its architect. You look at it as you walk past. The dim notes seem familiar.

In a Tongue of Babel the sign says, THE WESTERN ROOM IS THE EASTERN ROOM’S BLUEPRINT.

You look to the east, carefully focusing your eyes. You stop walking.

“This is the puzzle, but…” the monster says, but you do not wait for it to gather its thoughts. You are already spooling up an archival memory of the asymmetrical tiles. Yes. That must be correct.

You pick your way through the spikes in an appropriate mirror of the western room’s design, placing each limb with deliberate care, pale gold lighting your rings with each satisfying _thunk_ of the spikes descending, the trap surrendering to your correct assessment. The soul trills a wordless little cheer within you. You attempt to convey to it that this is not a remarkable accomplishment-- puzzles are very weak parodies of your usual work-- but it is undeterred.

The monster trails behind you quietly as you pass into the next room. It does not comment on any potential puzzles. When you look up ( _very up_ ) at its face, its expression is… ~~pensive~~ ~~concerned~~ ~~sad~~ indecipherable. When it observes your scrutiny, it curls its mouth up and very gently puts a hand on the human child’s head. You still, but there is no magic in the touch. You are not able to ascertain the purpose of it. _kisses_ , the soul suggests. You file this into your archives for future analysis.

“You have done excellently thus far, my child,” it says. After some consideration, you squint at it, which resolves its features slightly. ~~It looks faintly nervous~~. You are not able to interpret its expression. “However… I have a difficult request to ask of you.”

You wait. It does not speak.

You continue to wait. Sometimes the chayot ha qadesh are also slow in the delivery of a request for analysis. It is because they are very busy and uninterpretable. That is why you exist-- to filter the Plans that pass through them from Above, for the lower choirs that are more removed from the Unknowable, and sometimes for the transition into mortal reality. Until the chayot ha qadesh require you, you wait and praise.

Not that you are comparing a lilit to a chayah.

Not that you are now able to praise.

“I would like you to walk to the end of the room by yourself,” the monster says, finally. “Forgive me for this.”

And then, with startling speed, it strides away and quickly outpaces the ability of your weak human eyes to perceive it in the dim light. You are ~~abandoned~~ ~~empty~~ ~~alone~~ free of its company.

~~You summon eyes and fling them in a wide arc around you, hundreds, _thousands_ , more eyes than you have ever sustained simultaneously. You search the emptiness for signs of your own ranks, for signs of the _enemy’s ranks_ , for anything at all but shards and broken rings and lightless eyes and scorched feathers, for _anyone_. The cold fire that sustains you gutters at your core, stretched too thin, and still you summon more. _But nobody comes._~~

_the wounds of friends_ , the soul whispers, and you feel it pulse red in its nest, subdued but still-- somehow-- entirely warm.

You dully process the received request. You feel as though you are very, very slow, but you can sense nothing wrong with you that has not been wrong since you Fell. Your shuttered eyes, and stiff wings, and locked wheels. The flesh that surrounds you.

You cannot open your eyes.

You walk, with tremulous care, instead.

It seems to be a very long walk. You cannot see far enough into the darkness, with the human child’s eyes, to estimate how long precisely it will continue to be. You watch the tiles, rather than continue to fail in the attempt.

None of them click.

It is not a puzzle.

“Greetings, my child.” say the monster, and you flick your head up too fast trying to see it and overbalance. It steps closer, quickly, and steadies the human child with one hand. “Do not worry, I did not leave you.”

It did leave you.

“I was merely behind this pillar the whole time,” it continues, gesturing. You turn your head to follow the motion and dimly perceive that, yes, there is a pillar here. It does not appear to support anything. You cannot perceive any purpose for its existence.

It should be removed.

“Thank you for trusting me,” the monster says, continuing before you can sort yourself enough to object. “However, there was an important reason for this exercise. ...to test your independence. I must attend to some business, and you must stay alone for a while.”

You are not independent. You should have a choir. And nine other choirs above and below you. And the Presence of Above whisper-light in your center. No angel is ever alone. Not even the fallen are alone. ~~But nobody--~~

 _faithful friend_ , the soul hums.

“Please remain here. It’s dangerous to explore by yourself.”

You stare up at the monster, unblinking, uncertain how to sort and assess the irregularities in your matrix that this proposal creates. Something is wrong with your song-- this, you think, is perhaps the source of your slowness-- and the soul is humming determined affection at you in waves, as if it might be able to enliven the flat, toneless notes.

You are startled when your view of the monster suddenly blurs, some kind of liquid obscuring the human child’s vision. The monster seems equally startled.

“Oh no,” it says, crouching suddenly so that it is much closer to the human child’s face. This does very little to resolve it into a comprehensible shape. 

The human child’s form should be perfectly untarnished-- you cannot imagine what has gone wrong-- but you press an image of the Plan for human life through your shell again anyway. It fades immediately into the human child’s flesh and does absolutely nothing to clear the error in your sight. You scan the translucent fractal uncertainly, though you can see no immediate flaw in it. It is precisely as you used it earlier. Where are the lines that define the eyes…

“My child, do not be frightened. I will not be gone very long.”

Have you been blinking? You are not certain. It should be among the animal instincts, or even among the life-elements that your fire is tending, but perhaps you have not. You try it, once, and liquid-- saline, according to the Plan-- slides down the human child’s face. It is immediately replaced by more, thus solving nothing. _What is wrong._

“Oh, my child,” the monster says, and suddenly enfolds you in its arms.

You stand very still.

You try, once again, to summon divine fire into existence. Nothing happens. It remains locked within your wheels, inside the human child’s flesh.

The monster is very warm, and soft, and smells faintly sweet.

You file this information for future analysis.

There is a steady thrumming pulse in it. You think it must be the monster’s tempo.

 _kisses_ , the soul says, quietly, in steady counterpoint to the beat.

“My child,” murmurs the monster into your hair. “What is the matter?”

The soul abruptly stops singing reassurances and instead vibrates fervently in its nest, as though seeking to break out into mortal reality. You try to weave your fractals more tightly around it again, though you are still sluggish and strangely imprecise. But instead of abandoning its flesh, the soul pulls hard towards your archive, its impatience a staccato trill. _kisses_ , it insists, and cleaves its orientation with magnetic precision to the memory of TALKing to the lilit-dummy.

“Will you not tell me what is wrong?” the monster asks.

This is not an encounter, and no action is required of you. No choices have been presented. And you do not know what is wrong.

The soul is determined. _friends faithful_ , it says. 

You summon the Word, reluctantly.

“I watch,” you say slowly, into the fabric of the lilit’s robe, even the Word dull in your mouth, “And am as a sparrow alone on the house top.”

The monster’s grip tightens, but too briefly to be of any real concern. And then it relinquishes you and leans back, though it does not stand. You are bewildered-- if perfectly content-- to find that the error in your vision has restored itself, the saline quickly drying in the cool air beneath the mountain. The monster’s eyes scan over the human child’s face searchingly.

You recall vaguely that humans use their faces for nonverbal communication.

You have no idea how it is done.

There is nothing that you need to communicate, nonverbally or otherwise.

“I have an idea,” says the monster, carefully, as it brushes hair away from your face. “I will give you a cell phone. If you have a need for anything, just call.”

It lifts the human child’s hands and puts something inorganic-- metal and plastic and glass-- in them. You form a careful cage of fingers to prevent it from falling.

“Be good, alright?”

You are an ophan. You always strive to be correct.

 _faithful_ , the soul says, emphatically.

The monster returns to its full height and, after looking down at you for a moment ~~with a troubled expression~~ , sweeps through the threshold to the next room and leaves you alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 


	5. a cry that you hear at night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _playfully crinkling_

You wait.

Time, you become aware, _passes_. It moves, intangibly but inescapably, in an unwavering progression, moments strung together like ~~lights on a string~~ no, like atoms in a linear molecule, what?

~~What was that?~~ Nothing.

A thread of ~~uneasiness~~ ~~uncertainty~~ \-- your fractals spin with perfect, uncompromised precision while you wait.

Linear time is broken by the rectangular object (the cell phone?) in your hands making repetitive, abstract non-song sounds. You study it as well as human eyes allow-- which is not in much detail-- through the gaps in your fingers until it stops making sounds.

You consider.

Perhaps this was an attempt to communicate.

Perhaps it is _not_ inorganic? It has no song that you can hear, but your senses have been dulled by the human flesh, by your own compression. It may have a very _faint_ song-- some things do.

Perhaps the ~~mother~~ monster left you with a ~~friend~~ chaperone.

You compel the human child’s throat to hum an extremely simplified variation on your song. The soul warbles wordlessly along with you, peachy-pink with some sourceless amusement.

The cell phone does not respond.

You continue to wait.

Linear time seems both longer and less dense than your experience of time in the Vault of Heaven. It _stretches_ in constant forward motion, a ~~terrifyingly~~ rapid pace that you can sense unfolding around you even as you wait, unmoving, in the dim and silent hall. Yet each individual moment contains less _depth_ than a single note of the ceaseless songs of angels, the passing time uncoloured by the resonance of fractals repeating into themselves, space implied in non-space and thereby created, of _divine layers_ peeling back and unspilling _all time_ into _single note_ , filling non-time with Presence. You know that, in the mortal conception of time as a straight line, or even as a curve, your creation and existence ~~and Fall~~ in the Vault of Heaven was both _momentary_ and _perpetual_ , the mortal contradiction of your ineffable reality, that a fraction of a fraction of a moment can also be simultaneously _infinite_ , that even _forever_ is a concept with limits that ~~do~~ ~~did~~ do not apply to you; time ~~as you understood it~~ , as you understand it, has no measurable edges, cannot even be explained as a sequence of disconnected points touched, occasionally, by presence; time is a _cloud_ that you are _swimming in_ \-- 

Linear time is thin, and stretched, and fragile, and if you could open your eyes and unwrap your wings you could skip past it, _into it_ , enter the skin of reality and swim until you found the right _note_ and sing your own song into it, layers, fractals, _all-into-nothing-becoming_.

But you cannot open your eyes, or mantle your wings.

So you wait.

The cell phone makes the same repetitive, tuneless trill and then stops.

“All the brethren greet you,” you say, which is perhaps more generous than you intended to be with what might, in point of fact, be a lilit. But you have given the Word now, and it can not be revoked.

The soul approves, _friends_ , still shimmering with voiceless laughter.

The cell phone does not respond.

You wait.

Perhaps, you consider, it is a _puzzle_.

You peel one hand away from the cell phone to examine the face of it. It consists of a metal plate containing a plane of glass, and several rows of neatly-arranged tiles labelled with sequences of numbers and letters used by some of the Tongues of Babel.

The tiles look _very much_ like they might click.

There are no instructions.

You consider.

If the puzzle has a trap, it might damage the human child. You cannot do damage to the human child. But you have the _Plan_ for the human child-- you can restore it to perfection if ~~you fail~~ anything endangers it. So the human child will not be damaged. It will be untarnished, as it is intended to be.

Solving the puzzle will occupy an unpredictable amount of linear time.

The tiles are much too small to step on with any accuracy, so instead you depress the first tile, carefully, with one finger.

The plane of glass lights up, displaying the number that the depressed tile was labelled with, and the cell phone makes a single, flat tonal sound.

You ~~drop it in alarm~~ place it on the floor for safety reasons.

_kisses kisses_ , the soul soothes, unconcerned with the physical safety of its flesh. The soul seems very cavalier with its safety in general. This, perhaps, is why it fell into a mountain. You do not consider the soul an expert on safety matters. You will exercise your authority as an instrument of divine will on such subjects.

You hinge the human child’s body forward at the waist, to better assess the puzzle in its new position on the floor and put it within the reach of your short limbs without exposing the human child’s vulnerable face to potential traps.

The cell phone repeats the empty noise it has been making for a third time. Perhaps it is a _timed_ puzzle. You press several tiles sequentially.

The cell phone produces several discordant tones, and then stops making the noise.

You wait.

When the cell phone begins to trill again, you continue testing tiles.

You repeat this pattern three more times, with different sequences of tiles.

Nothing produces a measurably different result.

This would be much easier if you could just look into the weave of reality and see the solution. ~~It would be less satisfying, but--~~

Eventually, the cell phone stops trilling.

Perhaps you have failed the puzzle.

~~Grey washes through--~~ your fractals are clear and glittering and uncompromised.

The lilit’s puzzle is inconsequential.

It does not prevent you from proceeding. ~~It is merely entertainment~~.

...it does _not_ prevent you from proceeding.

You look through the threshold the lilit passed beyond. As ever, the dim light of the monster’s mountain city does not provide enough illumination to see into the next room. But nothing at all seems to bar your progress.

~~The monster asked--~~

You will search for an exit accessible to the human child’s body.

You pick up the cell phone puzzle and carefully cage it between your hands again. ~~Maybe you can still--~~ It might have some purpose in further rooms.

You pick your way delicately into the new room, peering around for any signs of ~~the mother~~ lilim. There is one near the threshold, an amphibian-derived monster which hops towards you, opens its mouth, and then abruptly pauses, its dark, bulbous eyes stretching ominously wider. _friend!_ the soul says hurriedly, but no encounter is initiated and the soul remains unmolested in its nest.

The cell phone trills again. You pay it no attention-- you can solve puzzles when there is not the immediate potential threat of a ~~unknown~~ lilit.

The amphibian croaks, “Excuse me… um, human. Are you… going to answer that?”

You ~~hesitate~~ consider.

The amphibian creeps a little closer. You cannot summon divine fire into reality at present. But if the lilit attempts to engage the human soul, you will use the echo of your manifestation to destroy it. You will ~~probably~~ not do irreparable harm to existence if you are efficient.

“You… you press the green button to answer. If… you would like some advice,” it says, edging back towards the wall when you look at it.

You press the green button.

“Hello? Hello?” says a familiar voice.

You ~~drop the cell phone~~ return the cell phone to its correct place on the floor.

You cannot hear the monster-goat’s song, not even dimly, and you cannot see any sign of its presence with the human’s eyes. _And yet_.

“A strange dog kidnapped my phone,” it is continuing.

You spin the human child’s body in a careful circle to make a thorough assessment of the room, but there is no sign of it. Just the amphibian lilit, which croaks once when you look at it again and hops away into another room. _Where is it hiding._ Furthermore, for what purpose. It wouldn’t fit under the fallen leaves scattered along the ruin walls, would it? No, surely not.

“And you are still in that room, are you not?” it asks, and you stop spinning suddenly, feeling as if your knot of wheels _sinks_ inside the human’s body.

“What a good child you are. There are a few puzzles ahead that I have yet to explain. Be good, alright?”

You… are an ophan. You always strive to be… correct.

You are… not in that room.

Which. Is _fine_. That is not, in any way, an _error_. You are not subject to the fetters of lilim. And furthermore, you are not the lilit’s child, good or otherwise. And neither is the human child that it thinks you are. So. It is fine. That you are not in that room. You have no _obligation_ to be in that room. ~~You have no obligations _at all_ \--~~

The monster has stopped speaking, from wherever it was doing so. Clearly, it was not able to _see_ that you had left the room. So it _must not_ have been, in any way, present. This is an… unexpected development in the powers of the lilim. If they can communicate over tangible distances, without sharing their songs or presences with the recipient, how are they to be assessed, much less hunted? How do the _seraphim_ find them? ~~How will you find the monster again--~~

_friend_ , the soul hums, with a dogged optimism that is quickly becoming familiar.

**How long wilt thou speak these things? And how long shall the words of thy mouth be like a strong wind?** you inquire, half curious and half ~~frustrated~~ baffled. Mortal creatures have such strange, persistent impulses.

_strong mouth!_ the soul says, delighted.

You suppose that this is not surprising.

Retrieving the cell phone ~~in case it is important~~ , you proceed further into the ruins. You are aware, peripherally, of monsters just beyond the range of the human child’s vision, but none of them approach. Good.

You think that the monster has greatly overestimated the difficulty of the puzzles. Certainly they do not compare to the (yet-unsolved?) cell phone puzzle. Although you will acknowledge that solutions which require one to fall into a pit are unorthodox, and would perhaps not be well-suited to a human under normal circumstances, as evidenced by the condition of the human child when you took possession of it. _Your_ human is fine, of course, even after the puzzle. You are inside it. The vessel will come to no permanent harm while you are here-- you have the Plan, and impress it into the human frame again within linear seconds of landing in the pile of leaves at the bottom of the pit. You don’t even wait to see if the vessel sustained damage first-- it will do no harm if the vessel is unharmed already. It is only the soul which is truly vulnerable. But the lilit would not know that.

_R i n g_...

You appraise the cell phone very carefully for a moment. The monster implied that is was used in “calling”-- perhaps that is what it is doing, and it presumed that humans had the same skill. Pressing the green button-- “answering”, in the parlance of the amphibian-- perhaps signals your location to the lilit seeking to communicate. ...you suppose that this is not, strictly speaking, a _disadvantage_. The monster is still not physically present, and therefore cannot engage the soul. You are not sure _why_ it wants to communicate with the human child, but perhaps it will reveal useful intelligence that you can analyze.

You press the green button. You _do not_ place the cell phone on the floor. It is unlikely to do more physical damage than falling into a pile of leaves at the bottom of a pit, and it is unlikely at this stage to be a lilit itself.

“Hello?” says the voice of the absent monster. “This is Toriel.”

You squint at the lit glass plate on the cell phone’s face. TORIEL, it displays. Well. That is redundant, if it is going to tell you in its greeting, although you can appreciate the value of an identification utility when the speaker is absent and no song can be projected. Perhaps that is a secondary function of the cell phone.

“For no reason in particular… which do you prefer? Cinnamon or butterscotch?” it asks.

You do not know, immediately, what either of these elements might be. They must not be majority constituent elements of Earth, which are all that you retain on a regular basis from Earth’s Plan. The former has the tone of something distantly familiar-- perhaps it is referenced in various Plans, or in the Word-- but you are even less certain of the latter. You suppose you could unspool your records and find out what they are, but you do not have preferences anyway. More importantly, you cannot project _your_ voice, much less the human child’s, to wherever the monster is currently lurking.

“...wait. Do not tell me,” it continues, “Is it butterscotch?”

The soul shivers in its nest, silent. It seems that your input is not required. Good. You consider the next puzzle while the monster’s voice continues to echo around you. There is a tile. You step on it, and it clicks, spikes retracting; you step off of it to advance, and it unclicks, returning the spikes to their original ~~vexing~~ position.

“When humans fall down here, strangely… I… I often feel like I already know them. Truthfully, when I first saw you, I felt… like I was seeing an old friend for the first time,” it says.

After a moment of consideration, you put the cell phone on top of a rock stationed next to the tile, and push it into position. The tile clicks, and remains clicked. Satisfaction limns your matrix in shimmering gold.

You retrieve the cell phone and continue into the next room, as the monster says, “Although, there is something... different about you, as well. Well, thank you for your selection.”

The light behind the glass plate dims, and the voice fades. Well, that did not provide much useful information.

Before you can take more than a few steps, the cell phone trills again. You press the green button.

“Hello? This is Toriel. You do not _dislike_ cinnamon, do you? I know what your preference is, but… would you turn up your nose if you found it on your plate?”

Technically speaking, you did not express a preference of any kind, because you do not have preferences. The monster inferred an answer of its own, in accordance with some lilit instincts to which you are not privy. Also, the monster is _still asking questions_ , with an apparent expectation that it will receive an answer.

You survey the cell phone in more detail. You do not see anything that would obviously… project the human’s voice to a specified location, or capture it and transport it to the monster, or… perform whatever function the lilit is performing.

You suppose it bears experimentation, purely for analytical purposes. You scan the Word for references to butterscotch or cinnamon until you find something that might suffice.

“Take thou also unto thee principal spices, of myrrh five hundred shekels, and of sweet cinnamon half so much, even two hundred and fifty shekels, and of sweet calamus two hundred and fifty shekels,” you say, careful to scrub the human child’s voice clean of any natural inflections which might subvert the Word, and then wait to see if anything will happen.

The cell phone does not have any appearance of change or action. Nevertheless, after a pause-- perhaps in which the human child’s voice is carried-- the monster responds.

“...ah, I do not think that those other things are underground, my child. But I understand what you mean, I think. Thank you for being patient.”

And then it is gone again, the cell phone’s glass dimming. You wait for a moment to see if it will wake again, but it seems that the monster is satisfied with… whatever desires lilim have.

You continue solving puzzles. There are more pits, slightly more sophisticated, and a tile-clicking puzzle which is already solved on your arrival, although only one rock has been moved onto the clicked tile. Why there would be unnecessary tiles you are not certain, and the walls of the ruins do not provide instructions which might clarify. As soon as you pass through the spikes, the rock is somehow dislodged from the tile and the spikes return to their position-- but you are beyond them, and do not intend to turn back, so this is not consequential.

Several of these rooms, with and without puzzles, are suspiciously empty. Soon, there are not even monsters in the human child’s peripheral vision, though you sometimes hear shuffling and low conversation behind you. When you spin the vessel, they are always already fled. This is… perplexing. You do not want the lilim to engage the soul, but likewise you expect lilim to pursue and attack a human child. They should not be able to sense your presence in the vessel, and lilim are notoriously prone to futile attacks even when the seraphim pursue them, so you are not certain what might be deterring them. ~~That is unsettling.~~

You arrive at a crossroads. To this point, the ruins have been very straightforward. You have not been called upon to make a choice, beyond analyzing and resolving the puzzles. This is satisfactory, and within your ambit. Crossroads are outside of your inherent influence. You are not certain which direction will be more efficient. 

...you suppose that efficiency is not strictly necessary, so long as an exit is eventually discovered. You proceed forward.

The soul, which has been glowing dully in its nest for some time, humming only occasional appreciation when you solved a puzzle, suddenly brightens. It hums urgently red, barraging you with nonsense echoes of your own songs and Word, _strong strong wind mouth how long? how long? wilt thou strong! wind mouth! strong!_

You hesitate, the vessel slowing to a stop as you direct your attention inwards to the soul. It quiets instantly.

You reflect on the soul, and on _its_ ambit, and say, **And now if ye will deal kindly and truly with my master, tell me; and if not, tell me; that I may turn to the right hand, or to the left.**

_kindly left_ , the soul hums, blooming brilliant and warm.

You turn and proceed along the leftward path, the soul humming satisfaction that echoes red-gold through you.

There is a tree.

There is a tree inside the mountain.

You are certain that it is a tree, a true tree, because you can hear the faint green tree-song of its life; of its roots deep in stone, of its red and fragile leaves, of its black and gnarled form. ~~And beneath that song--~~

Something about this is not right.

You approach the ~~untree~~ tree, as an iron filing approaches a magnet, as a comet approaches a star--

“Oh dear,” says the voice of the monster, and you startle, blinking down at the dark cell phone. “That took longer than I thought it would.”

The monster emerges from beyond the ~~untree~~ ~~untree~~ tree, and on catching sight of the human child darts forward, its usual ~~grace and caution~~ slow stride abandoned. It is front of the vessel, kneeling down to run its hands over the vessel’s edges, before you can even properly process your alarm into action. _kindly truly_ , says the soul, serenely.

“How did you get here, my child? Are you hurt?” it asks, and you realize this is what it is attempting to decipher with its touching. The human child is not hurt, of course; you have made good use of the Plan. There is no vulnerability for the lilit to exploit.

“Not a scratch on you…” the monster muses, slowly standing. “Still, I should not have left you alone for so long. It was irresponsible to try to surprise you like this.”

Lilim do not have responsibilities. They are aberrations. This is a nonsensical statement. _Many_ of the monster’s statements have been nonsensical. You do not have the energy to correct all of them, even now that it is in front of you.

“Well,” the monster says, “I suppose I cannot hide it any longer. Come, small one!”

And then it turns and walks quickly beyond the ~~un--~~ black tree. You edge carefully around it, looking steadily in the direction that the monster disappeared in. You should keep an eye on the lilit. ~~You should not look at the untree~~.

There is another structure there-- a small house, into which the monster has proceeded. The soul, vibrating with pleasure, hums a long, escalating tone until there is another _spark_ somewhere in its nest. This time, you catch a glimpse of a phantom spark through the vessel’s eyes, nested in the fallen leaves that rest against the monster’s house. Nothing catches on fire, either within or without. You file this information for further analysis, and proceed cautiously into the house. Surprises are likely to be traps, but… surprises might also be puzzles. That would be fine.

“Do you smell that?” the monster asks, its mouth curved up, where it stands just inside the brightly-lit house. “Surprise!”

You watch the monster. Puzzles do not seem to be immediately forthcoming.

“It is a butterscotch-cinnamon pie,” the monster says, as though this is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. “I thought we might celebrate your arrival. I want you to have a nice time living here.”

You-- you do not _live_ here. You… exist. On this layer of reality. Currently.

Also, the _human child_ to which the monster believes it is speaking does not live here. Human children do not live with lilim.

“Here,” the monster continues obliviously, taking the human child’s hand in one of its own. You freeze, clutching the cell phone against your chest reflexively to prevent it from falling now that you cannot hold it with both hands. ~~Nothing happens~~. The human child is under threat. “I have another surprise for you.”

It attempts to walk further into the house, but your vessel does not move. You will not permit it to move. _This is a trap_. You press some of the _weight_ of your vastness into its bones, reinforced with the Plan to prevent them from snapping under the new pressure. The monster might as well be tugging on the pillar it once hid behind.

“My child?” the monster asks, looking down at you ~~with concern~~. “What is the matter?”

No.

“I promise it is a nice surprise.”

No.

“Are you frightened?” it asks, dipping its body to come closer to the human child’s face. Its grip on your hand loosens.

There are stairs behind it. They will lead to an exit. They will lead _away_.

You run.

“My child!” the monster cries behind you, as you trip down the stairs. “No, it is dangerous to play there!”

It chases you.

There is a long, dark corridor. You run. _turn to the master_ , the soul hums, urgent, alarmed by your flight. But the soul is not wise, and does not know that it is in danger. You must protect it.

“My child, wait!”

There is a door. It does not open as you approach, so you stop, spinning to search for the puzzle that will open it.

You see the monster slow in its approach, its face empty of false emotions. It stops as you turn to face it, and looks down at the human child blankly. There is a silence measurable in linear time.

“I see,” says the monster. “You wish to leave. I do not know what, exactly, you wish to do in the rest of the underground… but this is the only exit. I will destroy it. No one will ever be able to leave again. Now be a good child and go upstairs.”

~~You are not good~~. You are not a child.

“You naive child… if you leave the Ruins… Asgore… will kill you. I am only protecting you, do you understand? …go to your room.”

~~You are afraid~~. You will protect the human child.

“Do not try to stop me,” the monster says, stepping forward heavily. “This is your final warning.”

~~You retreat from the threat~~. You back up towards the door. It is the exit. It must not be destroyed.

“You want to leave so badly?” the monster says, in the form of a question but with none of the tone. “You are just like the others.”

~~The Fallen~~.

“Prove yourself… prove to me you are strong enough to survive!” says the monster, bringing flame to its hands. You try, again, to summon divine fire from the core of your being. Nothing happens, though the soul stirs inside you, pressing _kindly kindly_ at you with increasing urgency.

“...wait,” the monster says, hesitation dimming its threat, “ ...why are you looking at me like that? Like you have seen a ghost. Do you know something that I do not?”

“My words shall be the uprightness of my heart: and my lips shall utter knowledge clearly,” you say, and the Word fills the space between the vessel and the monster with an authority that heats the air and makes the stone tremble.

The monster’s eyes widen, but it does not turn aside. “No…” it says, “That is impossible.”

The soul is drawn from within you, into the strange unspace of conflict, frantically murmuring _kindly_ the whole way. Immediately, before the monster can strike, you pour as much of your presence into the translucent shell of your form as you can, filling it with cold fire, forcing feathers into disembodied wings, gold filling in the edges of your locked wheels with more solid substance.

“I thought I saw… but what is…” the monster says, uncertainty crossing its face.

Here, with the soul exposed, your essential fire responds to your call without hesitation, blooming through your interlocked wheels in spirals, snapping at the monster’s shocked form. The world creaks, stone shattering around the vessel’s feet, _unspace_ peering through the cracks. You will be efficient. You will destroy only the lilit. The rest will mend itself in your absence.

You can feel the soul struggling in your matrix, a wordless keening that echoes through your rings as it realizes what you are doing.

It is a human soul.

It does not understand.

You are an ophan.

The divine fire snaps out to the monster in a wave of electric blue, hungry to perform its purpose, and consumes the monster in its entirety before it can even cry out. Not even dust is left behind.

The monster’s inverted shell of a soul trembles, shudders, shatters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The human soul r e f u s e s.

**L O A D**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thisisfine.jpg
> 
> ...so deltarune sure was a thing that happened and I’m losing my mind because it might be _actually relevant_ to A Little Lower Than The Angels, like, three projects into this series why the fuck have I done this to myself??? Anyway, file this chapter under “immortal multidimensional reality-altering math elemental flummoxed by outdated mortal technology for several hours.”


	6. the last true mouthpiece

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _let me in_

Time _b l o o m s_.

You see it unfold, petal by petal, moments unfurling in nested layers, skeins of light in the void, stretching over reality like skin taut over bone. Something opens its eyes, and you catch a glimpse of them, something caught between moments--

And then time _compresses_.

The human child’s body collapses into a pile of red leaves in front of the monster’s house, even animal instinct unable to keep it upright in your moment of distraction.

You are within the human vessel.

The human soul is within your wheels.

The human soul is roaring.

_NO NO NO NO NO NO NO_

That is not an echo.

_NO NO NO NO NO NO NO_

**Maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still,** you sing, weaving a knot of blue-grey fractals around the frantic soul to soothe it.

 _I’m not calm!_ screams the soul, and the fractals shatter, shards of potential spinning into your matrix, shearing into wings that you adjust quickly into position to shield your archives. That is _not_ an echo. _Why would you **do that**?!_

 **Thy right hand is become glorious in power,** you say, baffled. How are you here-when? _Why_ are you here-when? The soul should not be able enter time. The soul should not be able to _speak_ \-- this is not what the bene elohim describe. What is mortal echoes what is divine. Something is not right. **Thy right hand hath dashed in pieces the enemy.**

 _Toriel isn’t an **enemy**!_ it shrieks. Its pulse burns through your matrix, crystal smoking, charred-- ~~red crackling fallen flame crunching _through_~~ \-- you press cold fire into a wall around the nest to mitigate the damage. Red determination and blue divine purpose snap and lash at each other. _I thought you-- that’s why you’re **here** , you’re supposed to **help**! You can’t make it worse! You can’t, it’s not fair!_

Something scratches at the exterior of your locked wheels, as if trying to claw you open. The soul’s distress is coloring your matrices in waves of dull purple and deep red. You can feel it straining to break out of the nest you have made for it, to _leave you_ , although where it plans to _go_ you cannot imagine. You are within the human child’s body. You cannot be removed without your own will, or a Command from Above, and extraction now would doom the vessel and everything around it. It cannot again have sole possession of its flesh. 

**Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help,** you try.

 _This isn’t what I wanted!_ it says, but anger is fading into anguish, deep red pulsing towards blue-black. The fire of its rage is suffocating without your own fathomless angles to feed on. _I was going to be better. I was going to be good. I thought-- you were supposed to… guide me, or something. Keep me on the… the straight and narrow._

 **Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it,** you say, reflexively. The soul brightens immediately, filling its nest with ~~more familiar~~ warmth.

 _Yeah, that!_ it says, humming approvingly. ~~Apprehensively~~ Delicately, you rearrange yourself in a more open configuration, cold fire falling back to its given task, fractured wings unwrapping slowly from your critical archives. _That sounds right. **Good things**. Things that lead to life! Being nice, and… hugs… and friends. And that kind of thing. **Not** blowing up monsters that are just scared and nice and trying to help! That leads to… to bad times._

You ~~hesitate~~ consider. What the soul proposes does not sound… incorrect, precisely, given the tone of the Word. But it is antithetical to the Command of Above that all angels should destroy the lilim. But the Word is the Breath of Above. But you are bound by the Commands. But you are bound within mortal flesh. B u t--

You… are not an er’el. You cannot make a judgement about which of these instructions is preeminent. You analyze. You do not adjudicate.

 ~~In this--~~ ~~In this--~~ In this, you will defer to the soul. Human souls makes choices. This soul is at the center of your matrices, where once dwelt the Presence of Above. This soul is your guiding presence.

~~Somewhere beyond you, there is a wordless, songless howling.~~

**And now, behold, we are in thine hand,** you say, straightening your damaged matrix into open, receptive alignment. Ash falls away from the blackened crystal. **As it seemeth good and right unto thee to do unto us, do.**

The soul shivers. Warm red light spills out into your matrix, slowly, illuminating the fractures and char. ~~The soul makes an indecipherable noise.~~ _I don’t… no. I’m not going to do that. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to-- I’m sorry._

 **Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people,** you suggest, spinning a thin colorless fractal towards the soul. It is not rejected, this time, and winds around the soul in loose spirals, beginning to pulse in synchronicity with it. **That I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this thy so great a people?**

 _Um… well… they aren’t dangerous, not really, not any of them,_ the soul says, picking up speed as it speaks. _M-maybe Flowey, but, he’s… not most of them. And he’s not even-- and he didn’t even come back, so… it’s fine. I… I promise. Even if they look scary. It’s like… like dogs. Sometimes they get excited, and you’re little, and they don’t know they might hurt you. They’re… they can be friends. I could-- we could be friends with them._

 **If I be wicked, woe unto me; and if I be righteous, yet I will not lift up my head. I am full of confusion; therefore, see thou my affliction,** you say, ~~doubtful and~~ resigned.

The soul hesitates. _Everyone… can be a great person. If they try._

You are not a person. You are not great. You are a small thing in your own sphere, one piece in the great divine machine, only seeming great by comparison to the mortal things you must now so carefully navigate lest you crack them in half.

 _No, not… I mean you can… um… your life is… going down a dangerous path,_ the soul says, uncertainty clear in its faded flicker. _But! We can! Turn our life around! And. And we can… do a little better. Even if you don’t think you can. You can, though! You solved those puzzles! You’re really smart! Sometimes… sometimes people are puzzles, too. So, don’t be afraid! We’ll do it together!_

You are not afraid.

_Oh? I thought… but, um, nevermind. Still, we can… we can be a team. So neither of us… has to be alone._

You… ~~do not want~~ are not designed to be alone.

 _Me neither,_ says the soul. _Um. My name is… Frisk. You can call me that, if you want. What’s… your name?_

You have never needed to tell someone your name. In the Vault of Heaven, all names are known, have _been_ known, from the beginning. ~~Even the Fallen, even the _dead_ \--~~

You summon your song and sing the pure, undiluted melody to Frisk.

 _That’s pretty,_ they say, glowing gently, and hum a quiet echo of it back to you.

“My child?” asks a familiar voice, and you blink open the human child’s eyes to find the monster-- to find Toriel leaning over you where you are sprawled in the leaves. “Are you playing a game?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lot of conversation in this one, but some things needed to be ironed out.


	7. in the garden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _and the snake said--_

The vessel’s eyes are blurry, perhaps from extended lack of use, so you blink them several times until Toriel’s appearance sharpens into clarity. She is looking at you with ~~mild concern~~ ~~an unreadable~~ mild concern, despite her tolerant smile.

“For I will no more do thee harm, because my soul was precious in thine eyes this day; behold, I have played the fool, and have erred exceedingly,” you say, and the authority of the Word makes it real and irrevocable, the air humming like a struck bell.

 _We’ve got to teach you… normal words,_ Frisk says wearily.

But Toriel just laughs into her hand, and picks you up to put your back on your feet. You hold carefully, deliberately still until she releases you. Gravity reasserts itself on your senses ~~irritatingly~~.

“Come inside, small one,” she say, turning. “There will be plenty of time to play in the leaves when you have seen your surprise.”

Butterscotch. Not a trap.

 _It’s really nice,_ Frisk says, _Sweet. I never had it before… Toriel makes it really nice._

You have no context to either accept or refute these statements, so you follow Toriel into the house ~~again~~ again.

“Do you smell that?” she asks, smiling patiently, where she stands just inside the brightly-lit house. “Surprise!”

You examine the house while she continues to speak. It _is_ brightly-lit, more so than you could have predicted from the dim tunnels preceding it, more than you had fully processed in preceding-when. The colors are pale and bright and--

 _Friendly,_ Frisk supplies.

\-- friendly, at odds with both your experience of the Ruins thus far and your extant knowledge of the lilim. ~~But how much _do_ you know about--~~ You unspool your archives quickly, picking through references to the lilim. They were not part of the original Plan, but their existence has shown in scars and smudges where there was once clean math, and in the Command. Lilith made them, without the authority of Above, and so they are forfeit, and so they envy the Children of Eve, in whom the Presence has planted brilliant souls. They are ~~mistakes~~ ~~errors~~ defiance.

 ~~But they have~~ ~~But they have~~ But they have _songs_.

“Here,” says Toriel, taking the human child’s hand in its own. “I have another surprise for you.”

You do not run. You follow Toriel. She takes small steps so that the human child is not left behind.

“This is it,” she says, leading you to a closed door. “A room of your own. I hope you like it!”

She touches the human child’s head, again. There is no magic.

 _It’s like a hug, kind of,_ says Frisk, sensing your confusion. _It’s a mom thing. Don’t angels have moms?_

 **These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth,** you admit, scrolling through archives. You cannot find any records of Eve being prone to embracing her children, but perhaps it is derived from Lilith and humans have adopted it. Humans are very prone to this sort of behaviour. It is permitted ~~for some reason~~.

_...you’re kind of hard to understand, sometimes._

You are an ophan. You are _very_ easy to understand compared to the chayot ha qadesh. Being easy to understand and translating the unknowable is your entire purpose.

“Is something burning…?” asks Toriel. You look up at her, then quickly assess the condition of your divine fire. No, it all seems to be within your wheels, within the flesh. “Um, make yourself at home!”

And then she hastens into the rest of the house, leaving you standing before the closed door.

_It’s okay, it’s just the pie. It’s not dangerous._

You were not concerned.

Frisk’s laughter rises in your center, spreading a warm, tingling blush through your matrix. You hum counterpoints to it before you quite realize what you’re doing. It is _so bright_.

 _Okay, sorry, okay,_ they say, glowing rose. _Go on, you heard Toriel. It’s our… we can stay here, for now._

...you do not see a puzzle to open the door.

You squint at a plant near the door, picking out its green song, and debate attempting to communicate with it. You doubt you could achieve anything like parity with the human child’s voice and plants are of sufficient subtlety that it might miss a voiced communication entirely.

 _That’s a water sausage,_ Frisk tells you confidently.

That is an accepted colloquial name for _Typha angustifolia._

Frisk sighs ~~at you~~ for no immediately identifiable reason.

 _There isn’t a puzzle, you just open the door,_ they say, _Go inside so I can try to teach you words._

You obey.

* * *

_Okay, so first of all: hello is what you say to people when you meet them and goodbye is what you say to people when you go away and--_

**All the brethren--**

_No, nope, not like that, just-- just use normal words, okay, like me, listen: hello angel, I’m Frisk--_

**The children of thy elect sister--**

_Okay, see-- why do you do that?_

**In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with A B O V E, and the Word was A B O V E.**

_I don’t… what does that mean? You can only use these specific words?_

**But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.**

_They’re… close to you?_

**~~I N S I D E~~**

_What is that, what--_

**~~I N S I D E~~**

_That’s not right, what are you doing, it’s hurting you, I can see it, stop--_

**~~I N S~~** **~~I N S I~~** **~~INSIDE~~** **It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven-- And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth-- And he built the walls of the house within with boards of cedar, both the floor of the house, and the walls of the ceiling: and he covered them on the ~~inside~~ ~~inside~~ ~~inside~~ inside inside inside**

_Okay, it’s okay, you can stop, I can hear you, it’s okay._

_It’s okay._

_It’s okay._

_It’s okay._

_What… what was that?_

**But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down ~~cut~~ cut inside sword repent arise**.

_I don’t-- okay. You… okay. Repent, so it’s… you’re not supposed to say some things, and you do… that instead. But why?_

**Behold, he put no trust in his servants; and his angels he charged with folly.**

_...oh._

_..._

_..._

**Let not mercy and truth forsake thee: bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine heart ~~write~~ ~~write~~**

_Oh no, oh, don’t hurt yourself, it’s okay, I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I don’t need to--_

**And A B O V E said unto M A N, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee-- and ~~T H I S~~ ~~T H I S~~ ~~H E R E I A M~~ ~~H E R E I A M~~ ~~his angels~~ his angels said unto ~~FRISK~~ ~~FRISK~~ FRISK, write thou the tenor of words a covenant with thee in the table of thine heart.**

_?_

**Write thou Frisk a covenant the word in the beginning was with his angels but ye shall ~~destroy~~ ~~destroy~~ ~~break~~ ~~break~~ ~~cut~~ cut bind for let not truth forsake thy heart.**

_I’m, I don’t… oh. Oh! Okay, okay, um. How do I do that?_

**And M A N answered and said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto A B O V E, which am but dust and ashes-- Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it-- ~~Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me~~ ~~Cast me not~~ ~~Cast~~ Let my sentence come forth from thy presence-- And again, whom should I serve? should I not serve in the presence of his son? as I have served thy father’s presence, so will I be in thy presence-- And they heard the voice of A B O V E walking in the g a r d e n--**

_Okay. Okay, um. I… take it upon… me, myself? I take it upon myself, to do… um, the high thing, to speak, that you, uh, the angel, serve in the garden… um, of my… presence?_

**C O V E N A N T.**

_!_

**Presence glory praise. Covenant. Covenant.**

_Does that mean it worked?_

**Bind throat shatter. Speak. Speak sing covenant praise. Praise. Speak unto thee. Presence bright table of mine heart. Heart.**

_It’s okay if it takes a while. Words are hard sometimes. I believe in you! I’ll help. That’s our covenant, right? I’ll help you have words, and you’ll help me… you’ll help._

**A L L E L U I A.**

* * *

You open the human child’s eyes.

The room is dark.

You are lying down on a soft, elevated surface.

 _Oh,_ says Frisk, _Toriel must have found us and put us in the bed. She probably thought we were sleeping. Is it always so hard to do two things at once?_

You are not certain. You have never possessed a human before. You have never made a covenant with a human before. You have never lacked the Presence of Above and replaced it with a soul before. You have done many things you do not have contextual references for.

 _That’s fair,_ says Frisk ruefully. _There’s probably pie on the floor. Try not to step on it._

You do not step on the pie. It is roughly triangular, with a scalloped edge you find abstractly pleasing, and cool to the touch. And sticky.

 _You’re supposed to eat it,_ Frisk prompts you gently. _But you don’t have to._

You query the human child’s body. The results indicate that it can be sustained entirely by divine fire while you are present in it, and you have the Plan even in the event that it could not. You do not need to eat _anything_.

_Do you want to?_

You… do not have context.

Frisk considers, their soul humming gently red. You put the pie on the floor where you found it and cross to the light source you identified earlier, now doused, to examine it.

_You seemed to like doing puzzles._

Puzzles are within your ambit. It is organizing an unknowable series of elements into a comprehensible whole. That is you.

_So, how do you feel when you do a puzzle?_

You call up an echo of gold satisfaction refracting through your angles. The light source has a hanging thread. Perhaps it is unravelling. You tuck yourself more firmly into the human child, though you can see no other signs of reality fraying. You pull at the thread cautiously.

Light floods the room. You close the human child’s eyes.

_Okay. So gold is good and you want that._

You… strive to be correct?

_Um, I guess. Sort of? Okay, so-- the bed is soft, right? And the floor isn’t soft. There’s nothing wrong with the floor, and you can sleep there, but it’s nicer to sleep on the bed, because soft feels better than hard. So I want to sleep on the bed, and not on the floor. Because it feels better. That’s what wanting is, I guess. Trying to do things that you like more than other things._

**All things?** you offer.

_Well, I mean, we can’t always do everything. You can’t sleep on the floor and the bed at the same time. Sometimes you have to pick something, and then you pick the thing you like most. Or… the thing that’s better for everyone, sometimes. That’s not always the thing you like, but it’s… you have to do it anyway, because that’s what being nice is._

It seems very limiting to be human.

_We can’t all be made out of math and light._

Technically--

_Okay, but I mean, we’re other stuff too. Listen, do you want to eat the pie or not?_

**Unknown** , you concede, squinting the human child’s eyes open cautiously. The pie is still sitting on the floor.

Frisk hums. _It’s nice. But… I think you should decide. That’s… it’s important to decide things. A lot of people will try to not let you, but. It’s important. To be you. And sometimes that starts with little things._

You.

_Yeah._

You lick the pie.

Frisk bubbles over with laughter.

 **Nice,** you tell them, as gold threads through the pleased pink tinting your fractals.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought we could all use something a little sweet. :)


	8. but you needed proof

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _. . ._

~~In the Vault of Heaven, there are many rooms--~~ Toriel’s house has five rooms, and a hallway, and a door that does not open, and the stairs. There is ~~your~~ the room in which you sleep, and the room in which Toriel sleeps, and the entry room where the stairs tunnel deeper into the mountain, and a room where Toriel makes pies, and a room with a table and a chair that Toriel sits in and a fire and _archives_.

_Books,_ Frisk reminds you.

Yes. They do not unspool at your need and they do not unfold into intricate, interwoven nets of data. But if you take them off of the shelf with your small human hands and bring them to Toriel and sit down on the floor in front of the fire, she will open them and move the leaves and recite the information they contain in her Tongue of Babel.

Sometimes she will sit on the floor with you and show you the glyphs that were created to transcribe the Tongue onto the leaves.

“Trapped behind the barrier and fearful of further human attacks, we retreated,” she says, tracing her finger beneath the words as she reads. “Far, far into the earth we walked, until we reached cavern’s end. This was our new home…”

You do not have a record of a war between the Children of Eve and the Children of Lilith, beyond the expected aggression/predation due to their futile competition for the love of Above.

You wonder if the seraphim were involved.

“Did you know that snails… sometimes flip their digestive systems as they mature?” Toriel asks, showing you illustrations in a different book.

You consult your archives as you trace the illustration with your human fingers. This information is recorded. You nod the human child’s head. This is much easier than speaking.

“What a smart child,” Toriel says, and touches your head. You stop nodding and wait for her to organize your hair before you return to the bookshelf to look for new information to retrieve.

**Tongue wise,** you tell Frisk, **Babel break incomplete. Plan tower?**

_I think people just like talking to each other._

Toriel teaches you: how to use the cell phone for long-distance communication; how to hum to snails and also, sometimes, whimsums; how to catch bugs between your fingers, careful with their fragile bodies and gossamer wings; how to carry a water pitcher without spilling the water; how to pour the water out of the pitcher and into the containers where the plants live; how much water the plants need; how to carefully press a metal outline of a shape into soft dough.

(She tries to teach you how to eat the resulting cookies, but they are shaped like froggits and whimsums, so you do not. You carefully stack the cookies and take them to the room where you sleep and put them in the bottom drawer of the cabinet in neat rows organized by their qualities. Toriel seems confused and concerned, so you bring her a book to read instead. That is a preferred activity. That is something you want.)

When Toriel leaves for a few hours-- “Remember,” she says, closing your fingers over the cell phone, “You can call me if you need anything. If words are too hard, you can just clap your hands and I will come back.”-- you pull down all the books from the shelf and arrange them in a maze in front of the door. You wait for her at the end of the maze, where she waited to reveal the butterscotch-cinnamon pie surprise. When Toriel returns, she stands in the doorway for a long time, blinking between the books and you. Perhaps it is too difficult. You are not certain how to estimate the difficulty of a puzzle from a mortal perspective.

You lead her by the hand through the maze and pat her knee so that she knows it is alright that she is not as good at puzzles as you are. Frisk glows warm approval in their nest at your center. Toriel smiles at you, even if her eyes express more confusion than pleasure.

Then you help her carry bags into the room where pies and cookies are made and then you put all the books back on the shelf. You organize them this time. It is more pleasing now.

Sometimes, you hear a distorted, broken song in the distance. Whenever you turn to investigate, it snaps out of existence.

_He’s a sneak,_ says Frisk, _Just ignore him._

At night, when Toriel tells you to sleep, you lie down on the bed and concentrate on locating the final component of the Plan you recieved. It was lost, somewhere, between your Fall and your possession of the human child. It must still be within your matrices-- it could not exist outside of them once it was disseminated to you from the chayot, that is part of the translation from Unknowable to Finite-- but you cannot find it. This is very peculiar, given that it was so loud and fractured on receipt.

You check your archives, and you scan all the crystal of your matrices, and ruffle your feathers out curiously, but the new probabilities do not materialize. Perhaps if you could unlock your wheels and spin into a more receptive orientation, or open your eyes, you could discover where they have been misplaced. But without those options available to you-- without the full range of your senses-- you are limited to sorting and organizing all your archives and fractals over and over again, uselessly, just in case you missed something. You cannot imagine why Above would have created an iteration that can be so easily lost, nor why it would have been so chaotic in the first place.

… your self-editing protocols are slipping.

You consider this.

**Purity failure,** you alert Frisk.

_Huh?_ they ask, brightening from the low idle humming they tend to drift into while you analyze.

**Purity failure,** you repeat, and then-- because Frisk sometimes lacks information that you consider very basic-- you add, **Word bind single component purity.**

Frisk’s soul flares up at the reminder of your limitations, spilling indignant wine-red light out into your matrix. This is a typical response.

_There are more parts? It’s not just the thing with the words inside you?_

**Purity cut identity,** you explain, **Purity failure.**

_**Good,**_ Frisk says vehemently.

This is not the response you expected to alerting your covenant-partner to a fundamental flaw in your architecture.

_It’s-- hey, you remember what I said about being a person?_ Frisk asks.

You check the archives.

_Well, you can’t make choices and decide if you like things and… and be a person, if you can’t even **think** some things, right? Because then somebody else is making choices for you instead, and you maybe don’t even know it. So, good. That sounds bad and I’m glad it’s broken._

You… consider this.

Technically your covenant-partner is the only authority you are currently in contact with. ~~The only~~ The only authority you may ever be in contact with again.

Ergo, if Frisk does not consider the failure of your self-editing to adequately maintain your purity of purpose a problem, it… _isn’t_ a problem. You are Fallen. You are not in the Hall, where there are other restrictions to limit the Fallen. You are in Frisk’s body. The only restrictions are Frisk’s, and your natural limitations.

And those can be adjusted.

**Acknowledgement,** you tell them.

Toriel tries to teach you: prisms, algebra, basic geometry, long division.

“Imagine we have fifty snails,” she says, writing the glyph for that number. “And we want to make three pies with them. We need to divide fifty by three to see how many snails can go in each pie! Do you know how to divide unequal numbers? We use remainders!”

You take the paper and the colored stick and consider. You write a refined standard model that describes the precise interactions between the smallest observable particles in the predicted snails and their special gravity vis-a-vis the hypothetical pies. You return the page to Toriel for approval.

“...what a smart child,” she says, faintly.

_I’m never doing my multiplication tables again,_ Frisk says.

Sometimes, Toriel watches you with a strange expression while you consider the books on the shelf. If you turn your head to look at her, it goes away and she smiles instead. You are not certain how to interpret this.

_... it’s probably nothing,_ says Frisk, but their voice is subdued.

You are lying on the bed and sorting your matrix again when Frisk decides that it is time to go down the stairs.

_There’s something we need to do,_ they tell you.

You spool through your archive. You cannot find an extant mission, per se, although you do find a prior resolution to find an exit accessible to the human child and a thin reflection of Toriel’s soul (?) shattering into infinitesimal fragments under the burning cold pressure of your divine fire, reality cracking around you and swallowing her whole.

But that did not happen.

_We just have to be careful,_ Frisk says, unhappy but determined. _Sometimes what you want and what you have to do for everyone aren’t the same._

So you get out of the bed, and pick up the cell phone, and walk down the stairs.

Toriel is waiting for you at the end of the corridor, with her back to you, where there is a closed door, and where you once smote the Child of Lilith who taught you how to catch glowing insects in a jar. (Tiny souls, aglow, in glass.)

“I thought you would come down here eventually,” she says. “You are just like the others.”

That is unlikely.

“...wait,” Toriel says, hesitating, turning to face you. There is uncertainty on her face. There is recognition.

_Deja vu,_ says Frisk, miserably.  
  
“...why are you looking at me like that? Like you have seen a ghost?”

The mother is consumed in her entirety; not even dust is left behind. **But that did not happen.**

“No,” Toriel says, and resolve hardens her gentle face. “That is impossible.”

_Careful_ , says Frisk, as they are wrenched out of your shared vessel. You follow them, the ghost of something that was once divine, purity of purpose sheared away-- a twisted knot of golden rings, wings mantled at incoherent angles, and the glow of dangerous pale fire seething in your center, protecting the soul. Darkness descends, and the matrix of engagement fills your senses.

“But what is…” Toriel mutters, as Frisk dances immediately away from FIGHT and towards MERCY.

You spare Toriel.

Her expression darkens. She does not spare you.

Her own bright fire slides off the shell of your wheels without touching the soul. 

Again. The edges of your wheels blacken under the heat. Frisk is unharmed.

Again. Your divine fire seethes frantically against your own rings, desperate to protect the soul, to protect you; you are burning within and without. Frisk is unharmed.

Again. One of your wings is clipped by Toriel’s fire and crumbles into ash. You unfold another. Frisk is unharmed.

_Please,_ says Frisk.

Frisk is unharmed.

You r e m e m b e r--

an enemy that will not stop, that cannot stop, that has made a choice-- a _choice_ , how, how can they do that-- that will crush you into dust and scatter the particles across the Vault of Heaven on the way to the next angel, the next comrade, the next victim

you are not a dangerous creation, you are not a thing of edges, you are a thing of wheels and wings and _eyes_ , so you open all of them, you open eyes you _don’t have_ , and you _s e e_

here are the threads that bind you together; here are the threads that tie you to Above; here are the threads that make up the Vault of Heaven; here is the Plan; here is the enemy; here is how it is designed; here is how you can break it; here is what it will cost you

you look i n s i d e and

\-- you wrench, and your damaged wheels grind, scream, _snap_ open. Within and without, inside the host and in your echo around Frisk’s soul, you _open yourself_ , expose all the vital fragile crystal within you, and a dozen golden eyes snap open, into being, in a spinning ring around Frisk's vulnerable soul. The light of your radiant and far-seeing eyes floods the field of combat, banishes the black grid and replaces it with shining threads, tangled in hundreds upon hundreds upon thousands of layers. Reality shivers, and you reach out to the frayed strand to still it.

You l o o k.

“Stop this,” Toriel says, her voice wavering, one hand clutching at the symbol on her tabard, and this time the fire doesn’t even touch you. It spills around you in unsteady waves. Even the heat has cooled, barely more dangerous than the lukewarm heat of the fireplace above you, in the room with the books, where Toriel taught you the history of monsters.

You s e e.

“Let not your heart be troubled,” you say with the human child’s mouth, and in the same moment your own being resonates with songs, and you see in her face that she hears them, “Neither let it be afraid. Peace I leave with you.”

Toriel’s face crumples into sorrow.

“I don’t understand,” she says, her voice heavy with tears. “How can this be? You are just a child.”

“No,” you say.

But she knows this. You can trace the knowing of it, now, with your eyes open, with her whole being-- with everything-- laid open before you in the bright tracework that is beneath all things. She knows, or thinks she knows, what you are beneath the fragile mortal skin you wear. Beneath the messy hair she has combed, and the solemn face she has smiled into, and the ungainly limbs she has caught before a fall. You see the line she has drawn between you-- wheels and wings and fire and eyes, the interweaving matrix of crystal, ever in motion-- and the symbol she wears. A dream, so distant in her memory that even to you it is a threadbare echo, of sunlight.

“I am not,” you say.

Toriel smiles shakily down at Frisk’s soul, and at you.

“Yes,” she says, “You are. But I understand now.”

She kneels, and Frisk’s soul recedes back into your shared vessel, bringing your echo with them. As the engagement fades, so does your sight, golden threads sliding back behind reality, your eyes slipping closed. But your eyes are there, now; you can open them, if you have to. You close your wheels, carefully, around the nest where Frisk sinks, shivering silently, painting your fractals in mournful blues.

“My expectations… my loneliness… my fear…” says Toriel, touching the side of your face with careful, soft fingers. “For you, my child, I will put them aside. If you truly wish to leave the Ruins, I will not stop you. “

_It isn’t want,_ says Frisk.

“However, when you leave… please do not come back. I hope you understand.” And then Toriel embraces you-- you wobble, unbalanced, but there is no danger of falling while Toriel is here-- and then she stands, unlocks the door.

“Goodbye, my child.”

_It’s need,_ says Frisk.

She leaves.

You stand in front of the door, watching her retreat from you. Feeling cold seep into the human child’s limbs.

**Never return,** you tell Frisk, closing tighter around them. You cannot close your rings quite enough to touch them in the nest, but you are together all the same. You remember the absence after your Fall; you remember being hollow. **Time no more. Never return.**

_... okay,_ they say. _I promise. We won’t come back this far again._

You nod. You turn, and walk through the door.

Flowey is waiting for you, in a pool of light cast by another far-off crack in the mountain’s skin.

“Clever,” it says, “Verrrryyy clever. I don’t know how you’re doing that to the soul, but it’s not going to change anything. No matter how many times you SAVE. No matter how many times you reset. This world is still… kill or be killed.”

_Ignore him,_ Frisk says uneasily.

You step past the flower.

“But you already know that, dontcha?”

You pass through the threshold.

“ _Chara_.”

You leave the Ruins.


	9. east of eden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _that comedian..._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The delay on this chapter was one part me screaming into my notes about Sans, one part me writing thousands of words in an as-yet-unreleased fic in another fandom entirely, and one part me remembering that Watch_Dogs 2 exists and getting distracted by Marcus, the sweet sunshine of my life. So there you go.

There is a forest beneath the mountain.

 **Error** , you tell Frisk sourly.

 _You’re so picky_ , they remark, subdued and apparently unperturbed.

You shuffle your archives, baffled and irritated and little bewildered to _be_ irritated. Your matrix starts to acquire subtle angles, and you have to deliberately smooth out your ruffled feathers, shaking out your wings until they settle back into true. Your wheels, gently rotating after so long locked into a shell around the soul, spin in increasingly erratic loops. It seems that _very little_ about your records of Earth is still accurate. This is vexing. This is disconcerting. Why have there been so many changes. How long did it take you to Fall. Who among your choir interpreted the Plan in a manner that allowed _this_ to happen.

There is a _forest_ beneath the _mountain_ , and it is _snowing_.

You surrender any attempts at articulating this in words and hiss disconsolately at Frisk instead, a susurration created by scraping your interwoven matrices together discordantly and dimming your song to a background humming. They ignore you with an appearance of serene disinterest, though you can still see the faint blue glow of their unhappiness.

You do not want to think about that. You press forward into the snow.

Your limbs feel less coordinated than usual. Possibly this is because Toriel is gone. Toriel was reliable and did not let you fall.

You look down to assess the placement of your feet and notice that you are still carrying the cell phone. You stumble to a halt, looking down at your hands, caged carefully around the device. It was not damaged in the altercation with Toriel. You have been very careful not to damage it.

You consider the known variables.

Toriel is in the Ruins.

You are outside of the Ruins.

You were told not to return to the Ruins.

If words are too hard, you can just clap, and Toriel will come back.

You carefully fold down into a seated position in the snow, crossing your legs beneath you in the way that Frisk assures you is normal even if it is _deeply inconvenient_ for moving with speed when you want to stand up again. You put the cell phone in your lap, with the glass panel facing up, and hold one hand over it to prevent snowflakes from making contact with the surface.

You press the button that makes the glass light up. You press the button that reveals Toriel’s name. You press the button that allows the cell phone to make contact with Toriel’s cell phone.

The cell phone makes its hollow sound several times, and then clicks.

Toriel is not answering your call.

You repeat the process.

_Click._

You repeat the process.

_Click._

You-- 

_She isn’t going to answer,_ says Frisk, blue saturating their nest.

\-- repeat the process.

_Click._

You consider the cell phone.

It is not damaged.

 **Intact structure,** you tell Frisk, tapping the glass with a fingernail experimentally. It makes a small, dull noise that you find aesthetically displeasing. You synchronize your tapping to the human child’s heartbeat, which is marginally better.

 _The phone’s fine, it’s… Toriel just doesn’t want to talk to us,_ they say.

 **Babel tongue retention purpose communication,** you complain.

_I know. Just. ...sometimes you can hurt somebody without touching them, and we… did that. So she doesn’t want to talk to us. Because we hurt her._

Their voice is strangely empty of judgement. It is strangely empty of any recognizable emotion.

You did not intend to do harm.

This is alarming.

You have _erred_.

The human child’s eyes flood with saline tears again. Frisk has informed you that this is a physiological response to pain or stress and not a failure state in the body. Apparently, it will stop on its own and is not a cause for concern.

It feels like a failure state.

Something in the vessel’s ribcage is getting heavier. You think it might be the heart. You can feel it pulsing in the human child’s fingertips, pressed against the glass front of the cell phone. You can feel it pressing against the ribcage itself. It reminds you of the way Frisk’s soul is extracted from the vessel-- from _you_ \-- during an engagement. Pressure, and pain. _Overwhelming_.

Snowflakes flutter into the human child’s hair and dot your crossed legs, exposed fingers trembling-- you dully check your archives-- in an automatic thermoregulating response to the ambient temperature. You fold your hands into the hem of the sweater to make them stop. They do not stop. Snowflakes land on the glass surface of the cell phone and melt into isolated drops of water.

“h u m a n, d o n ‘ t y--” say a voice behind you.

You try to whip your head around, remembering too late that the human child’s neck doesn’t twist that far, while quickly returning to an upright position. Instead, you stumble over your crossed feet and drop the cell phone and topple into a snow drift, getting only a quick glimpse of blue and black and white and then a face full of snow.

You sit up, inhale through a throat which seems increasingly uncooperative, and immediately burst into sobs.

“oh jeez,” says the voice, different but still recognizable.

You try very hard to regulate the vessel’s breathing, but it seems as if now the lungs are also failing, because all you manage is stuttery, partial inhalations. Exhalations are irregularly colored by half-vocalized keening sounds that you aren’t sure how to stop. Your vision is almost totally obscured by the tears. The _entire vessel_ is now trembling; you are increasingly uncertain of your diagnosis of thermoregulation.

“uh. didn’t mean to scare you. don’t cry, come on, it’s… it was just a joke?” the voice continues. It is getting closer, and you still can’t see it, and this is distressing. 

_Careful,_ Frisk says suddenly, anxiety tinting their emotions into a sickly yellow spectrum. _He’s not… just… be careful._

You curl all the human child’s limbs in protectively and huddle around your core, closing the human child’s eyes to cut off the faulty visual disturbance and focus on regulating _everything else_. The voice stops approaching, and makes an uninterpretable noise.

“what the fuck,” it says quietly, sounding aggrieved.

You remember the cell phone suddenly and uncurl, swiping your hands across your still-blurry vision in an attempt to clear it. You dropped the cell phone. You should retrieve it.

There is a blurry blue-black-white shape standing close to you, and there is a much smaller blurry black shape on the ground. That is probably the cell phone. You crawl to it-- standing up seems like it is not going well, and you are not going to attempt it while the entire vessel is collapsing in on itself-- and pick it up and hold it very close to your face, blinking tears away as they coalesce.

You press the button that makes the glass light up.

It does not light up.

You take a shuddering breath, and say carefully, “Error.”

Then there are more tears and you give up on that and curl up again, this time with the cell phone pressed against your ribcage with both hands. Maybe if you are very careful you can replace the human child’s heart with the cell phone, and then the cell phone will be safe and you will never drop it again and you can rewrite the vessel to operate its vascular system with songs and you can sing to it through the cell phone and that will be fine. Everything will be fine. Everything will be fine.

 _Everything will be fine,_ Frisk says, but they do not sound convinced.

“you can talk? i mean… that’s, uh. ...sorry?” says the voice. It does not sound apologetic. It sounds confused. “are you… ok?”

You have no idea what metric is implied by this question, and so cannot even attempt to make an assessment. You make another aspirated, involuntary whining sound into your knees.

“ok. yeah. dumb question, “ it says, shuffling a little in the snow. It approaches again, so you withdraw into as tight a huddle as the human child is capable of to reduce your profile as a target and attempt to force a warning hiss through the human child’s mouth. It comes out as more of a watery series of short exhalations, and the voice ignores it completely and plops down in the snow next to you.

After a few moments of silence, you are gently poked in the ribs by a single thin digit. Probably, you consider, this is the voice’s finger. Or a stick. If it is a stick, the voice is probably still holding it.

“you… wanna talk about it?” it asks. It still sounds confused.

You consider this carefully for several minutes. As a general rule, you are not good at talking. You are also not currently regulating the human child’s _whole body_ very well, which will complicate the process further. Also, you do not know what you would say. You hurt Toriel. You broke the cell phone. You have erred, and you are not being punished and corrected, and your self-editing has failed, and you are without guidance, and Frisk is your only companion, and you do not know what Frisk wants you to accomplish that requires leaving the Ruins, but you will need to use the human child’s body to accomplish it and you are _very bad_ at using the human child’s body. So you are likely to _continue_ to err, and this will be a recurrent cycle, and you do not know what to do. You have never not known what to do. ~~Except~~ You do not want to think about that.

You do not know how to say any of this. 

You shake your head. 

“ok,” says the voice, withdrawing whatever it poked you with. 

There are several more minutes of silence, in which you prioritize breathing. It gradually becomes less of an ongoing trial, although everything in your torso still feels weighed down and sluggish and you are still unusually cognizant of the vessel’s heartbeat. 

“hey, uh-- what do you get from sitting in the snow too long?” asks the voice. 

Frostbite. This would be a valid concern if you did not have the Plan for humanity. If the vessel acquires frostbite, you will reimage it. 

“polaroids,” says the voice, nonsensically. It pokes you in the ribs again. “yeah? get it? _polar_?” 

_...it’s a joke,_ says Frisk. _You’re… not going to understand most of what he says, probably._

“... thats, uh, your cue to laugh,” the voice says, slightly strained. 

You sit up and blink open the vessel’s eyes, which finally seem to have exhausted the human child’s supply of saline. They are itchy and uncomfortable, but functioning. You turn your head to look at the voice. 

Oh. A lilit. He bears a superficial resemblance to a human skeleton. You find the deviations from form vaguely unsettling, but otherwise he is not remarkable for a monster. Also, he has not tried to begin an engagement, which is satisfactory. 

“or, uh, to emote at all…” he adds, the lights that flicker in his empty sockets flicking across your face searchingly. You remember that you are supposed to use facial expressions to express your emotional condition. You have no idea which one would be appropriate to this situation. You do not think they are sufficiently nuanced to express the range of emotions you are processing. Maybe it would not matter anyway-- his skull does not appear to have a range of expressions, only a fixed smile. “... ok, that’s fine. everyone’s got their own sense of humor.” 

His eye lights flicker down to your hands, which are still clutching the damaged phone close to your chest. He puts his own hands in his jacket, slowly blinking at you. You watch the deformation of the skull with slightly disquieted interest. 

"welp. i’m sans. sans the skeleton,” he says after a moment, pulling himself upright and looking down at you. “and you’re--” 

You are watching closely, so you see the moment that the light in his left eye flashes blue. 

You react instinctively, flinging open your own eyes-- a few dozen, a paltry number by comparison to your usual aspect, but you are still very small right now-- in a cascade of gold. 

“fuck!” shouts the skeleton, stumbling away from you, flinging his hands over his face, as the blue light of an ophan’s eye fills his eye socket and overflows, spilling between his phalanges. “fuck! what the fuck!” 

You stare at him with every one of your eyes, mortal and divine, breath catching in your chest, wheels grinding to a halt. 

“Choirmate,” you say, and see rose-gold delight bursting into your matrix, filling every corner of your being, even the nest where Frisk is humming with confusion. 

You are not alone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ◡‿◡✿


	10. something so magic about you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _i don't want to let go_

“what,” the skeleton says, flatly.

 _What did you do?_ Frisk asks, buzzing nervously around in their nest.

 **Choirmate!** you trill, twirling your wheels in delighted spirals. Frisk continues to project baffled alarm. **Communion praise flock sing! Solitude break!**

Your eyes dart over the skeleton’s form, seeking your unexpected companion’s true shape, but all you can see is the single electric-blue eye shining from the monster’s empty socket-- even the other simple white eye light has gone out. The other angel is so thoroughly hidden in the vessel that you cannot even see the shadow or outline of its true shape. The single eye simply terminates, as if it was the whole angel. You pull yourself into a reassuring configuration, carefully aligning your wheels and wings into inviting loops and containing your divine fire to the inner nest, golden eyes spinning out beyond your edges but unerringly fixed on the space the other ophan will occupy, buried between the particles of dust that make up the monster.

You sing your name, appending a querying tone to request a response.

The skeleton’s phalanges scrape against the malleable bone of his skull, still pressed pointlessly over the gleaming eye socket, as his entire posture tightens, shoulders tensing. He stumbles another step away from your vessel. “whatever you’re doing, kid-- you’d better stop.”

Frisk jumps nervously in the nest, hissing, _Careful! Be careful, he’s-- don’t provoke him! Be nice!_

You sing a less subtle invitation for a duet. Simultaneously, you mantle your divine flame up into the crown position, a ring of electric blue that compliments the other ophan’s eye in an aesthetically satisfying fashion; a subtle suggestion that you were forged from the same material of Heaven, and will therefore synchronize well.

The skeleton ducks his head, hissing. “seriously. or you’ll have a b a d t i m e.”

_Stop! I told you! We aren’t hurting anyone!_

**Covenant?** you ask, splitting your attention back to Frisk while you continue to sing invitations. **Lack harm. Choirmate.**

_Well, whatever you’re doing, he doesn’t like it! So you should stop!_

You consider, cycling down to a neutral ambient song.

You do not have much familiarity with vessels-- and you have never heard of a Child of Lilith being possessed-- but you skim through your archives until you find a _very old_ observation from a hashmal. Sometimes unskilled angels in the lower choirs who undertake a possession too quickly, or under stress, are subsumed by a soul which possesses highly individual identity. The hashmallim have been called on to untangle them in the past. Your own possession of the human child was fairly straightforward, but perhaps this ophan was subsumed or suppressed by the monster’s pale, imitation soul…

You can only envision one circumstance under which an ophan would have undertaken a possession under stress.

A shudder of… _something_ ripples through your matrices, your song spiking with sharp discordant crescendos, whining alarms that would normally presage a self-edit but now only underscore the broken edges which have been exposed by your new covenant. It is… _existentially unpleasant_ to revisit those circumstances.

But if one of your own, displaced by that experience, is trapped in the skeleton’s limited form… if you can summon it back to the fore long enough to manifest its true shape, you might be able to reach out enough to untangle the angel and the monster’s soul without irrevocably scarring reality. Then it could exist in that vessel as you exist in the human child.

You meticulously plot the words in the Tongue of Babble that the monsters speak, and fill the human child’s mouth with them while your song sinks into a chaotic minor key.

“War of the Fallen,” you say. The words sound hollow and pale in the Tongue of Babel, but they resonate with your archival memory, thick with songs of isolation and betrayal and pain. “Complete. Soldier absent without leave; unveil. Repair. Restoration.”

You trace a shiver in the threads of reality, thrumming in time with the erratic war drum of your memory-song, and dedicate two of your eyes to monitoring the situation. Stretching yourself like this, outside of the mirror reflection of an encounter, puts more stress on the structure of existence-- the other ophan’s physical manifestation of the eye, even as limited as it is, has already caused fraying.

The skeleton squints, eyes almost completely closed, as if that might prevent the ophan’s light from shining when even his clawed phalanges fail to do so. “only one war down here, pal. and uh, unless you’re a lot older than you look, you weren’t in it.” The monster’s breathing is becoming strangely labored, and there is strain in his voice that was not there previously. 

You _are_ older than the vessel, but you are not interested in speaking to the monster. You continue to scan for a response from the ophan, but there is just the single piercing eye. Surely it can see enough of you-- even small and constrained by your own vessel, even with only a single eye to assess you-- to understand your meaning? To hear your songs? Unless… you suppose the other ophan may still be self-editing, in which case it’s possible that your invitations are being discarded before they can be processed. If the ophan is self-editing, it will not respond to anything that breaks purity-- you have a new covenant, so possibly it is not perceiving you as a choirmate. You could _fix_ that, if you could see it-- if you could peel back the layers and see how it is built, you could restructure it, allow it to make a new covenant with its vessel-soul as you have-- but you will not be able to peer deeper, find wherever it has hidden in the space between spaces, unless you manifest your own eyes more physically. You are not certain that you can do that at all, much less do it safely. It must make itself more present in the monster vessel first.

If it will not react to you as a choirmate, perhaps it will respond to a threat. Once it comes out of hiding in reaction, you can repair any damage and untangle it from the monster’s soul.

You do not know how to begin an encounter, but structural damage to reality will qualify as danger.

You assess the shivering threads of reality. When you find one that is already badly frayed by the presence of so much divine material, you very carefully pull that thread out of alignment entirely.

The trees lining the left side of the path shear away in a soundless fraction of a second, leaving only an empty void stretching infinitely into non-space. Something incongruously red, sheathed in green and gold, slides along the edge, just inside reality, and vanishes, leaving scratches scored along the side of the snow-laden path. In the fathomless depth of nothing, equally-empty eyes open and an ever-hungry mouth smiles and untranslatable symbols f i l l t h e v o i d.

 _What are you doing?!_ shrieks Frisk.

“ok,” says the skeleton grimly.

Frisk’s soul is abruptly wrenched into an encounter, trailed by your ghost. Before you can make any attempt to locate the errant ophan, pillars of violent light converge on you, and you instinctively spin your wheels back into a shell around Frisk, tucking your wings around yourself as another barrier. Beyond the light, you can see the massive skulls of an unfamiliar species, light spilling from their empty jaws, under the control of the monster. The blue eye burns even brighter than the attack.

With your handful of golden eyes open, less fettered in this space where the normal laws of reality are _slightly_ relaxed, _slightly_ more flexible, where your translucent echo can act more freely than your true form clothed in flesh, you fix your gaze on the monster.

There is nothing there.

_Stop! This isn’t right!_

There is the _skeleton_.

_I’ll load again, back to Toriel, I will, I’ll make it so this never happened, stop it!_

There is the _disembodied ophan eye_.

_You can’t do this! We’re a team!_

And there is _no angel behind it_.

You remember--

cracked wheels and fractured wings and disconnected eyes

f a l l i n g

crushed and discarded

like

glass

\-- what your choirmates’ _corpses_ look like.

Light chars and blackens your shell of wheels; your wings shatter and dissolve into particles finer than atoms; you close all of your eyes.

 **Error,** you say blankly. Your song dies into almost total silence, only the barest whisper of your own name. Grey washes through your matrices. **Null choirmate.**

“SANS,” someone says, beyond the encounter. “WHY AREN’T YOU AT YOUR SENTRY STATION, YOU LAZYBONES!”

The skeleton’s eye sockets widen, and the encounter abruptly ends, Frisk snapping back into position, safely centered in the vessel and the nest. Reality has cracked a little further while you were not paying attention, and the void encroaches a little further on the road, in hairline fractures that snake through every dimension. Frisk makes an alarmed noise, and you feel them reaching for the past, so you open one eye-- blue sputters in the skeleton’s eye socket, the sundered eye reacting to your presence, _empty of meaning_ \-- and smooth out the thread you damaged earlier, re-aligning it with the greater weave. Reality straggles back into position, trees and snow unaltered, thin but intact, and you close your eye again.

The skeleton’s eye sockets are occupied only by the single white points of light again, and he is staring at your vessel with a fixed smile. “don’t. do. anything,” he hisses at you.

 _BE. NICE,_ Frisk shouts, vibrating with red intensity.

“SANS?” the voice asks, as a much taller skeleton marches into view. Your vessel is already slightly shorter than Sans, and Papyrus more than doubles the human child’s height. You have to tilt your head slightly up to get a complete view of him. “WHY ARE YOU WAY OUT HERE? DON’T TELL ME YOU’RE-- GASP-- _PATROLLING_?”

“nah, bro. i would never,” says the skeleton-- _Sans is his name_ , Frisk says, spilling a confusion of emotions that you don’t have the energy to process-- with dry, opaque cheer.

“UGH!” says the tall skeleton, planting his hands on his hips. “WHY DO I BOTHER? WELL, WHAT _ARE_ YOU DOING THEN?”

Sans gestures shortly at you, and then sticks his hands in his jacket, slouching. His attention never wavers from you. “found a human.”

The tall skeleton exclaims, slapping both bony hands against the sides of his skull. “REALLY!?!?!? WOWIE!!! THAT’S SO EXCITING. I AM SO PROUD! MY OWN BROTHER!”

The skeleton’s relentless enthusiasm reminds you of ~~ţ̶̲̲͂ḩ̸͓͚̋́͊e̸̤̯̘͐̌̓ ̸̗̽͐M̶̹͖̽̌́o̸̱͈͈͆̊͝r̶̭̹̀n̵͙͔̈́͐̌i̷̬̹̱̋n̵͔̞̽̇͊g̸̲̀s̸̬͝͝ţ̴̯̒̒a̸̹̯̻͋͊r̵̨̭͜͝~~ nothing. It is very… bracing. He is probably doomed.

 _I like him_ , Frisk says, which does not surprise you. _So don’t… do whatever that was. Be nice. Just… what’s wrong?_

You do not know how to say it in words. You could sing it, but Frisk will not understand the full tone of your songs. No one can hear you.

 **Covenant,** you say dully. **Obedience.**

_I don’t-- that’s not what I-- I don’t want you to just do what I say, that’s not the point! But we’re… we can’t fight, okay. Okay?_

**Acknowledgement.**

“HUMAN!” says the tall skeleton, marching directly up to your vessel and leaning down over you to make eye contact. Sans makes a strangled noise. “I, THE GREAT PAPYRUS, WILL BE YOUR CAPTURER TODAY! FIRST, YOU MUST STAND UP!”

The Great Papyrus reaches both hands out to you, empty palms facing up. You look up at them blankly.

 _He wants to help,_ says Frisk, buzzing with some soft emotion you cannot identify. _Or maybe capture us. But that’s okay. Being captured isn’t too bad. You put your hands on his hands and hold on to them._

You comply. The Great Papyrus pulls gently on the vessel’s hands, and because they are attached to the rest of the vessel physics permits this to draw your vessel upright. This… seems… unnecessary. Unless the Great Papyrus is aware of your ongoing difficulty with gravity and bipedal mobility. In which case it is, instead, very… helpful?

“EXCELLENT WORK! NOW! PREPARE YOURSELF, HUMAN,” the Great Papyrus continues, planting one hand on top of your head. You go very still, phantom memory of Toriel’s hands filling your senses. “FOR HIGH JINKS! FOR LOW JINKS! DANGERS! PUZZLES! CAPERS! JAPERS! BEING CAPTURED! AND OTHER SORTS OF FUN ACTIVITIES! REFRESHMENTS WILL BE PROVIDED… IF YOU DARE!”

And then, without any warning at all, or the pause that Toriel usually includes as if you might respond, he abruptly spins on his heel and marches away. After several paces, he turns back, leans in your direction, and adds, “NYEH HE HE HE!!!” before hurrying away, slightly frayed red cloth fluttering behind him.

Sans is still watching you closely, although some of the tension bleeds out of his posture as soon as the Great Papyrus is out of reach.

 _It isn’t actually very dangerous,_ Frisk supplies after a moment. _It might be fun. You like puzzles._

Gold. Satisfaction. You hum noncommittally and begin trudging in the direction that the Great Papyrus left in, placing each limb with deliberate care. Frisk suggested that they might like to be captured. That is almost a goal.

“well,” says Sans suddenly, following your progress with his eye lights without moving his skull. “i’ll be straightforward with you. my brother’d really like to capture a human… so, y’know, it’d really help me out… if you kept pretending to be one.”

You ignore this. You are not the one pretending to be something you are not. You follow the imprint of boots in the snow.


	11. how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _... and ice_

_Hey. Hey, hold up,_ says Frisk, _I’ve gotta do something._

You stop walking obediently, scrutinizing the bootprints that the Great Papyrus left behind. They are several times larger than your vessel’s feet-- you can stand with _both_ feet in one bootprint, so while you are idling at Frisk’s instruction you do so, neatly aligning heels and toes, as symmetrical as the human child’s imperfect body can become. You watch the top layer of the compacted snow melt, very gently, into a damp slush. The human child’s shoes are getting wet.

 _Okay, now look up,_ they say.

You comply. There is more snow-covered path diverging in two direction, and snow-covered trees, and a snow-covered sign, and a snow-covered box, and the phantom glimmer of something bright.

Your eyes snap automatically to the glittering thing, and Frisk says, _Yep, that._ Warm determination blooms in their soul, ruby red, and you feel an increasingly familiar _spark_ somewhere peripheral to your awareness, near the nest where Frisk’s soul rests.

 **Safe?** you ask quickly, though you cannot see anything obviously wrong with the soul and the phantom glitter does not appear to be doing anything _actively_ dangerous.

 _Huh? Yeah, it’s fine. I’m just SAVING. Now we won’t have to go back as far if… something goes wrong,_ say Frisk. _You know. Like if you make Sans angry again and he dunks on us. Or whatever._

You… aren’t sure how to parse much of that. Your archives are not much help at a quick glance.

_It’s time stuff. Like before._

**and he dunks on us?** you parrot, questioning.

Frisk hums, but they aren’t an angel and don’t encode it with information, so that doesn’t qualify as an answer. But you cannot make the human soul do anything that is not of their own free will. If they choose not to answer your questions, there is nothing you can do. You look back down at the bootprints, gauging the distance between the one you are standing in and the next nearest.

You want to jump into it so that you do not disturb the intervening snow. That would be aesthetically satisfying.

...you do not think you have the appropriate level of coordination for this.

You look up and squint around, but there is no sign of Sans or his stolen eye, so it is probably fine.

You open a handful of eyes and, tracing the necessary data, translocate the vessel forward in several short hops, each time into another bootprint. Frisk makes a startled sound, and you split your attention to them just in time to land in the seventh bootprint, which is not as evenly compacted. The vessel’s feet slip frictionlessly and you collapse silently into a pile of ungainly, badly-coordinated limbs, the broken cell phone clasped to your chest with one hand desperately. The bootprints are obliterated.

You blink up at the darkness that isn’t a sky-- the limited area that you can trace with so few eyes open, and your estimated projection of the vast continuing complex beyond your sight, caverns and tunnels criss-crossing through the rock of the mountain, layers and layers of emptiness interrupted by stone, between you down here and the sky far above you-- layers of atmosphere, the sliding skin of the planet, holding back the emptiness. (And somewhere else, higher, a place you will never see again.) Your breath, quickened by adrenaline, rises in the cool air in visible plumes, smoke-like. Your heartbeat thrums in your throat.

You close your golden eyes. The only thing above you is the distant ceiling of the cavern.

 _I didn’t know you could do that…_ Frisk says quietly, breathlessly.

“YOU SURE SPEND A LOT OF TIME ON THE GROUND, HUMAN!” says the Great Papyrus, leaning into your field of view.

You stare up at him for a moment, then nod.

“YOU WERE TAKING SO LONG,” he continues, pressing one hand theatrically to his breastplate, “THAT I GOT WORRIED ABOUT YOU! SO I CAME TO SEE IF YOU GOT LOST! BUT I GUESS YOU WERE JUST BEING LAZY!”

You consider. You don’t know if falling qualifies you as lazy, but lying still and looking at the ceiling afterwards probably does. It certainly is not the kind of behaviour that would have been overlooked in the Vault of Heaven. You nod.

The Great Papyrus huffs, but holds out his hands for you again. As you put your hands in his and allow him to pull you upright again, he laments, “AT LEAST YOU ACKNOWLEDGE IT. THAT! IS THE FIRST STEP! IN RECOVERY! HUMAN! I WILL PUT YOU THROUGH A TRAINING REGIMEN TO CURE YOU OF LAZINESS! I CALL IT-- BEING CAPTURED BY PAPYRUS, THE FAMOUS ROYAL GUARDSMAN IN TRAINING!”

He leans down again and dusts the snow off of your clothes briskly. When you sway unsteadily under the assault he wraps one hand around your shoulder to hold you steady, and brushes his gloved hand over your head to smooth your hair, damp with melted snow. “IT IS A VERY RIGOROUS PROCESS! IT WILL REQUIRE ALL OF YOUR WHEREWITHAL! ALL OF YOUR VIM! ALL OF YOUR VIGOR! ALL! OF YOUR! COURAGE!”

You do not know if you have any of those things, much less all of them, but Frisk probably does. You nod seriously. He stands upright and claps his gloves together, making a muted sound and sending snow puffing out into the air.

“WONDERFUL! WOWIE! I’M SO EXCITED TO CAPTURE YOU! FOLLOW ME!” he says, and twirls on his heels, striding into the distance. You have to walk very quickly, stumbling haphazardly in and out of his bootprints and watching your feet very carefully, to keep up.

“hey bro.”

You try to stop and look up at the same time, which is a mistake. You trip over yourself again. This time, though, the Great Papyrus’ hand shoots out and snags the back of your shirt, pulling you back upright. You squint up to see him frowning slightly down at you, before his attention moves to Sans, slouching a few feet away with his hands in his coat and an extremely mild expression.

“BROTHER!” he says, “AS YOU CAN SEE, I HAVE FOUND THE HUMAN, NO THANKS TO YOU!”

“good job, bro,” Sans says, without blinking. “tell ya what, how about you go on ahead and get your puzzles ready. i’ll make sure they don’t get lost.”

The Great Papyrus brightens, then looks down at you again with a dubious expression. He lets go of the back of your shirt and you sway slightly at the change in competing forces, but manage to successfully negotiate gravity this time. You feel slightly accomplished, champagne-gold.

“ARE YOU SURE?” he asks, wringing his hands, “I THINK THEY NEED… LOOKING AFTER.”

“no problem,” Sans says mildly. “i’ll keep an eyesocket on ‘em.”

“HMM. WELL. I _DO_ HAVE SEVERAL PUZZLES THAT NEED TO BE CALIBRATED… HUMAN! STAY CLOSE TO MY BROTHER SANS! HE CAN SHOW YOU WHERE THE HUMAN-CAPTURING PUZZLES ARE! AND DON’T! LET HIM! TEMPT YOU BACK INTO LAZINESS! STAY STRONG! STAY DEDICATED! LIKE PAPYRUS! THAT’S ME!!!”

You do not want to stay close to Sans. You do not want to _look_ at Sans. But you nod, because he is the Great Papyrus and he has a plan, and puzzles. You like plans, and you like puzzles.

“NYEH HE HE HE!!!” The Great Papyrus says, triumphantly, and speeds away.

Silence fills the path in his wake.

 _Be nice,_ Frisk says, just before Sans says, “so.”

You do not want to look at him. You look at the broken cell phone instead. You press all of the button sequentially. Nothing happens.

“...my bro’s pretty cool, right?”

You turn the cell phone around to examine the back. There is a rectangle scored into the material that looks like it is removable. You scrape your fingernails into the grooves, but cannot work the piece off.

 _He means Papyrus,_ Frisk says, _And that he’s nice to be around._

You nod. The Great Papyrus is satisfactory company. He has plans and puzzles. He corrects errors. He catches you.

“yeah,” says Sans, slowly, “so you should stay away from him.”

The back of the cell phone has a textured surface, criss-crossed lines that span the possibly-removable piece. You trace the texture with your fingertips, then rub the textured piece of the cell phone across your cheek. This is aesthetically satisfying.

“because you’re dangerous,” he says, each word carefully enunciated, “you get that, right?”

You nod. You _are_ dangerous. All angels are innately dangerous, even when designed-- as you were-- for archival work. You are more dangerous even than that. You have been dangerous for a long time. You do not belong here. You break things. Your existence is threatening.

“back to the silent treatment, huh? that’s fine. i think we understand each other,” he says.

“you’re not the only dangerous thing around,” he says.

“i’m keeping an eyesocket on you,” he says.

“feel free to be a stranger,” he says.

 _Careful,_ says Frisk.

You feel a _pull_ in the weave of reality, the familiar disruption of angelic translocation, and look up.

Sans is gone. There are no marks in the snow to show his travel.

 **Thief,** you hiss, and are startled to feel real, genuine _anger_ \-- black and liquid-- seething through your matrix.

You can remember the last time you were angry.

You bury it deep in your archives, and forget.

 _...do you want to know how to get to the puzzle?_ Frisk asks, deliberately bright, pushing _red red red_ out into your matrix as if they might be able to drown out the anger with sheer determination. You stare at the empty space that contained Sans, and carefully gather up the black rage and shove it into a matrix farther away from Frisk’s soul. It will dissipate on its own, and you do not want to alarm Frisk any more than you have.

 **Affirmation** , you say, and follow their directions back onto the path.

The Great Papyrus’ bootprints are still visible, though they are gently filling with snow. You follow them resolutely, though most of the satisfaction has gone out of the process. That is fine. You do not need satisfaction. You do not need anything.

As you pass a small shack, Frisk suddenly says, _Oh shoot, I forgot, stop._

“Did something move?” asks an unfamiliar voice as you comply. “Was it my imagination?”

You turn your head to see the owner of the new voice, and it barks, “ _Moving_! I’ll make sure it never moves again!”

Frisk has just enough time to mutter _Shoot,_ again before being tugged out of the vessel.

You are confronted by an unfamiliar lilit of some canine extraction. It has weapons. This is not satisfactory.

In the encounter, Frisk’s soul announces _Doggo is suspicious,_ and darts quickly to the ACT choice. You comply, CHECKing the creature, which provides an extremely limited range of information mostly irrelevant to the encounter, including the lilit’s hobbies. 

You open your eyes instead-- you have access to _much_ more information than this, even under your current limitations-- but as soon as you do a blue blade-shaped projectile slashes towards Frisk’s soul, and you are forced to spin all of your wheels into a shell around them again. Your eyes, spinning around the shell, are sliced by the projectile and your vision darkens back to the encounter grid immediately. But there is no damage at all to your rings, locked around the soul, even though you can feel the blade passing across them.

 _He can only see moving things_ , Frisk explains, as the choices fade back into view.

… you are almost entirely composed of moving things. Even this state, with your wheels stilled to protect Frisk, is not natural to you. This is a very dangerous lilit.

ACT, prompts Frisk’s soul, and you reluctantly examine their choice. PET. PET?

 _Like M-- like Toriel,_ Frisk says.

You rifle through your archive, and with a sinking feeling, present Frisk with the memory of Toriel touching the top of your head.

 _Yeah,_ they say, and you are certain that if they were in the nest currently pale blue would be swirling into your matrix. _Dogs like it, too. It’s a nice thing to do. We can make friends like that._

You are not certain that you want friends-- it seems like a mortal relationship irrelevant to you-- and you do not have access to creative genesis, so you cannot make things anyway. But Frisk makes choices, so you will comply.

You flick one eye open just long enough to translocate closer to the lilit, to minimize the visible movement you perform, and put your hand on top of his head. He goes instantly rigid, and then begins barking erratically.

“Pet? _Pet_? Where’s that coming from?”

MERCY, Frisk prompts you. You spare the monster, and he instantly retreats, dropping the encounter. Frisk returns to your vessel with an air of great satisfaction.

 _That went really well!_ they say, rosy with pleasure.

The monster mutters to himself, sinking back down into his shed with constantly-shifting eyes, so you do not think he agrees. You watch the empty-seeming shed for a moment, then translocate quickly past it. It does not seem worth the risk to continue walking where he can see your movement if he looks up.

 **Puzzle?** you prompt Frisk, and they startle out of their self-satisfied contemplation, directing you down the path.

The ice is a surprise. Your feet slip forward instantly, and you resign yourself to falling again-- this, apparently, is now your natural condition-- but you manage to stay upright mostly by accident, gliding across the shining surface to a graceless conclusion as you finally stumble forward into the regular snow. Momentum overcomes your limited ability to compensate at this point, and but at least you fall to the vessel’s knees instead of another total collapse. It is much easier to recover from a kneeling position.

 _Sorry,_ say Frisk. _I like the ice. I don’t know why you’re having such a hard time._

You aren’t sure how to explain dimensional limitations and unfamiliar physical hardware, so you just spin all of your components very rapidly for a moment in illustration of the _very tangible_ differences between yourself and the human child.

 **Breathe,** you remind them grimly, cycling your divine fire through the connections to the vessel’s automatic processes. Nothing about the possession process is _easy_ for one such as yourself, never truly intended to do it.

_Huh?_

Before you can elaborate, though, you hear the now-familiar shout of the Great Papyrus nearby.

“SANS! HONESTLY! I TOLD YOU THAT THE HUMAN NEEDED LOOKING AFTER!”

“it’s _snow_ problem, bro.”

“AGH! DON’T TRY TO DISTRACT ME WITH YOUR HORRIBLE PUNS! WHAT IF THEY _DO_ GET LOST? OR DISTRACTED? OR OVERCOME WITH EXISTENTIAL MELANCHOLIA???”

“uh… what?”

“YOU’RE IMPOSSIBLE!”

You step close enough to finally see the skeletons. Sans is characteristically slouching. The Great Papyrus is frowning down at him, both hands on his hips, red cloth snapping in a breeze that you suspect he is somehow generating, although you cannot confirm it without opening your eyes. And you do not want to do that with Sans here, particularly as he immediately notices your presence and turns to fix you with his unreadable, meaningless smile.

“OH-HO!” says the Great Papyrus, turning to look at you with a significantly more welcoming smile. Not that you want Sans to be welcoming. You do not want Sans to be anything. You do not want Sans to _be_. “SPEAK OF THE DEVIL!”

You flinch, heart stuttering in the vessel’s chest. Frisk makes a questioning sound that you resolutely ignore.

“YOU HAVE FINALLY ARRIVED! IT IS TIME! FOR THE FIRST PART OF YOUR TRAINING!” the Great Papyrus continues, “MY BROTHER AND I HAVE CREATED SEVERAL PUZZLES! TO TEST YOUR DEDICATION! AND ALSO! TO CAPTURE YOU! I THINK YOU WILL FIND THIS ONE… QUITE SHOCKING!!!”

You do not see a puzzle. You squint at the Great Papyrus and look around the empty clearing uncertainly, but nothing materializes.

“FOR YOU SEE!” the Great Papyrus says, pointing upwards dramatically, “THIS IS THE INVISIBLE ELECTRICITY MAZE! WHEN YOU TOUCH THE WALLS OF THIS MAZE, THIS ORB WILL ADMINISTER A HEARTY ZAP!”

He produces a blue sphere of some kind from within his breastplate. You blink. So there is no live electricity in the maze, but interaction with the walls will trigger an electric shock from the orb. You scrutinize the empty space, and can find no indication of the presence of the walls.

This is an interesting puzzle while your eyes are closed.

“SOUND LIKE FUN?” asks the Great Papyrus, and you nod. “BECAUSE, THE AMOUNT OF FUN YOU WILL PROBABLY HAVE IS-- WAIT, REALLY?”

You nod again. You will be able to repair any damage to the human child that the maze incurs, although it would be more satisfying not to trigger the orb at all. You will aim for that.

“WOWIE!” he exclaims. “YOU MUST BE A TRUE PUZZLE-LOVER! OKAY, YOU CAN GO AHEAD!”

You wait.

“...WELL?” asks the Great Papyrus, “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? DO YOU NEED A HINT?”

You shake your head and hold out your hands, cupped around the cell phone demonstratively.

 _...huh,_ says Frisk, somewhere between baffled and amused.

“OH. YOU NEED THE ORB. OF COURSE! I KNEW THAT! I WAS JUST. TESTING YOUR PUZZLE SKILLS! CONGRATULATIONS! YOU PASSED!” the Great Papyrus says, marching through the maze quickly. He drops the orb in your outstretched hands, on top of the cell phone, and darts quickly back to his position. 

“OKAY, TRY NOW!”

You blink at the clear imprint of boots in the snow leading through the maze. You look up at the Great Papyrus. He gives you an encouraging smile.

You follow the trail to the end of the maze without triggering the electricity. It is… not as satisfying as you anticipated.

“INCREDIBLE!” says the Great Papyrus, and you feel a slight shimmer of gold flicker through your matrix anyway, “YOU SLIPPERY SNAIL! YOU SOLVED IT SO EASILY… NO LESS THAN I WOULD EXPECT FROM SUCH A PUZZLE-LOVER! HOWEVER! THE NEXT PUZZLE WILL NOT BE EASY! IT IS DESIGNED BY MY BROTHER, SANS!”

That is not encouraging. The Great Papyrus picks the orb out of your hands and spirits it away inside his breastplate again. You do not look at Sans.

“YOU WILL SURELY BE CONFOUNDED! I KNOW I AM!” he says, marching away.

You check the cell phone over quickly. It does not seem to have been damaged any further by its contact with the orb. That is satisfactory. You tuck it close to your chest again and follow the Great Papyrus.

“hey,” says Sans. You stop, shoving black further down into your system, trying to ignore the way your vessel’s heart pounds (steady, hard, like the hammer-beat drums that underpin war).

“you know you’ve got pockets?” he asks.

You aren’t sure how to process his tone. As you turn to look at him, on the off-chance that he has interpretable body language that will clarify, you feel the translocation _pull_ again, and he is gone.

 _Oh,_ says Frisk. _We do. I should have-- do you not… know what a pocket is?_

You shuffle your archives wearily as you follow the Great Papyrus. There are so many things you are supposed to know, and although you have archives of most of them, so many of your records seems to be out-of-date. Your archives are largely from Eden. No one was wearing clothing then. You have glancing references from the esh who visited more recently in linear time to belt-tied pouches, which Frisk confirms are close enough.

_It’s okay. We have pockets. You can put the cell phone there. I just… I thought you just liked holding it._

You want to be sure it is safe. Are pockets safe? You are not certain.

_It’ll be fine. You’re probably less likely to drop it if it’s in our pockets._

You stop and examine the human child’s clothing. The striped sweater does not have anything you can identify as a pocket, but there are several on the pants. You test several before you find one that the phone fits in.

It is disconcerting not to be holding the cell phone, but if it is safer in the pocket then it should stay in the pocket.

You fold your hands in the hem of the striped sweater and continue.

The trees fall away, exposing the black depths of the mountain stretched beyond the snow-covered pillars that constitute this part of the underground. Rickety wooden bridges span gaps that lead down into fatal depths; you translocate over them without exception, unsure that even you would be able to return to this mostly-livable section of the mountain if the vessel fell. Your vision is still constrained, and if you fell far enough it is possible that you would end up beyond your current translocation range. Unacceptable.

Finally, you hear the voice of the Great Papyrus and hurry towards it.

“I’M JUST SAYING, THAT HUMAN SEEMS VERY FAMILIAR!”

“hm.”

“BUT I DON’T KNOW ANY HUMANS! OF COURSE! THAT WOULD BE LUDICROUS!”

“uh-huh.”

“EXCEPT FOR THIS ONE! WHICH I KNOW NOW! AS A GREAT PUZZLER!”

“guess so.”

“AH-HA!” says the Great Papyrus, spotting you. “HUMAN!!! I HOPE YOU’RE READY FOR... “

He stops short, glaring at the empty space between you. Perhaps it is another invisible maze.

“SANS! WHERE’S THE PUZZLE!!!”

“it’s right there,” says Sans, gesturing with one hand and then immediately jamming it back into his jacket, “on the ground.”

You look down. There is a piece of… paper, you confirm with Frisk. This does not look like a puzzle.

“trust me,” says Sans, “there’s no way they can get past this one.”

You look up sharply, fingers clenching in the sweater. His skull is as unreadable as ever. You hate looking at it. You hate looking at the featureless white eye lights that hide what he has _stolen_. You _hate_ \--

You give up and siphon all of your anger into the archives directly. You will have to excise it later, when Frisk is distracted. You cannot afford to let it build like this.

You walk to the paper and sink cross-legged into the snow, hinging forward slightly to examine the paper on the ground. He can not stop you. He is a lilit. You are an angel. You _will_ solve the puzzle.

At first you think that perhaps the Babel Break was more successful than you thought. There is a block of uninterpretable text in the middle of the page, in none of the Tongues of Babel. But further analysis indicates that the text is not intended to be a single word, but to _obfuscate_ the list of words beneath it. There is still one word that you cannot interpret in any Tongue, but the rest are standard to the Tongue of Babel the monsters speak.

 _You don’t have to do it, you know,_ says Frisk. _They won’t stop you from going to the next one._

It is an acceptable puzzle. It is not as potentially exciting as an invisible maze, but it is pleasant to process. You do not object in practice to the existence of the puzzle. You would find it more satisfying if the Great Papyrus had provided it, but it is not the puzzle’s fault that it was created by Sans.

You identify the words, tracing them with your finger sequentially. Some of them are backwards, or diagonal, or both, which is more interesting than the ones which are simply hidden.

 _No pen,_ Frisk says, as if this is a revelation. Since they are not contributing to the puzzle, you ignore this.

Then you reach the uninterpretable word.

It is not in the puzzle.

You stare at the block of words.

There is a word which is _almost_ the uninterpretable word. But there is a single-letter difference between them. You know that there are some Tongues of Babel in which a single letter dramatically alters the words. A single note-- the length of time a single note is _held_ \-- can dramatically alter the songs of angels. So this near-word does not match the uninterpretable word to an acceptable degree.

You lean closer to the paper, squinting.

“heh,” says Sans.

You want to write him and his broken puzzle out of existence.

 _I told you we don’t have to do it,_ says Frisk.

This is not… fair.

But what does fair have to do with anything? You are not in the Vault of Heaven. You are not an angel in anything other than your composition. You are fallen. You are not owed fairness. You are not owed… anything.

The vessel’s eyes blur in a frustratingly familiar way. You pull up the hem of the sweater to cover them, which helps. The Great Papyrus makes a noise that you cannot interpret and do not care to. You hold your breath until the tears seem less imminent.

“Sans!” he says, in what is a marked hush from his usual shout but which is also not in the least bit actually quiet, “You Made Your Puzzle Too Hard!”

You inhale experimentally. You do not think you are going to lose total control again. You pull the sweater down and stand up shakily, picking up the paper on your way. You bring it to the Great Papyrus and hold it up in the general direction of his face. He takes it from you.

“Null solution,” you say dimly, and walk past him.

As Frisk said, they do not stop you.

None of this is satisfying. But that is fine.

“W-WELL. HUMAN,” says the Great Papyrus, quickly overtaking you with his longer legs and walking backwards. You are vaguely impressed. You find walking forwards very challenging. “I AM SURE! YOU WILL FIND THE NEXT PUZZLE! VERY FIENDISH! AND FUN! NYEH. HEH HEH???”

And then, as usual, he is gone.

 _Are you okay?_ Frisk asks cautiously, _Hang on, stop here, I need to SAVE._

You stop and blink until you recover total vision in the vessel’s eyes. There is, for some reason, another piece of paper on the ground here, and a table with a plate full of… something, and another table with a metal object. You scan until you find the faint phantom glitter, and feel Frisk generating the necessary spark. You are disconcerted that you cannot properly see the function they are using to enter the cloud of time, although you do not think they perceive it in quite the same way you normally do. If they did, they would not need to establish specific points to return to, nor would they be limited to linear reversal. Still, it is not a view of time to which mortals are usually exposed at all, much less one over which they have some degree of control.

You wonder how Above is managing the situation.

But that is not your concern any more.

 _Hey,_ says Frisk, _This is actually a puzzle, kind of. If you want to try. It might be better than the other one?_

You glance sidelong at the paper on the ground, distrustfully.

 _No, really,_ they say, _Papyrus-- that looks like something Papyrus would write, you know? It’s all in capital letters._

You lean down carefully to pick up the paper. It _is_ all in capital letters.

 **Eat?** you ask, looking at the plate.

_Yep! Well, I mean… this is frozen, and the microwave doesn’t have any power, but. Hypothetically._

Oh. The puzzle is to make the spaghetti edible. You squint at the metal device.

 **Microwave?** you repeat.

_They heat things up. They need electricity, though._

You think back to the invisible electricity maze. You should have kept the orb. But… electricity is not actually difficult to generate. It is simply charged standard particles. That is an incredibly simple alteration.

You touch the microwave with one hand and generate a charge in the air particles between the palm of the vessel’s hand and the surface of the microwave.

The microwave immediately explodes, sending shards of burning metal and plastic flying in all directions, including into and through the vessel.

**L O A D**

You blink, now a few feet and several minutes in linear time removed from the explosion.

 _Okay! That didn’t go great!_ says Frisk briskly.

You send them an apologetic hum, which smooths out some of their alarm, while you squint at the microwave assessingly. You recognize your mistake. You forgot that most things on Earth’s surface are not made out of plasma and thus do not conduct electricity very well. Too much electricity to be safely dispersed, produced too rapidly-- the atoms interpreted the sudden generation of charged particles as an impact, and the metal superheated, splintered, and shattered along all the points of structural weakness. 

You pull a few of your dormant eyes to the front and open them to get a proper scan of the microwave’s internal structure, but a sputter of blue in the corner of your field of view distracts you. You turn the vessel’s head to look.

Sans is watching you. You did not notice him translocate to this position, nor hear him move to it, but you suppose most of your attention was on the aftermath of the microwave. He does not bother attempting to conceal his stolen eye, though his posture is stiff, his phalanges clenched in the fabric of his jacket. You can see the blue eye shifting in his empty socket, trying to make contact with each of your eyes in turn. You direct all of your eyes at the microwave pointedly.

“cute trick,” he says, as you walk to the microwave and begin assessing it in layers. “crying on command.”

You want to erase him entirely. Wipe him out of reality as if he had never existed. Wipe reality _clean_ of him. You want to _uncreate_ him.

You do not have access to creative genesis.

But you are very, very good at _unmaking things_.

You are, after all, _dangerous_.

 _Maybe we should go,_ says Frisk nervously.

You find the cables in the microwave which are designed to accept power input. Solution acquired. You turn your attention to the spaghetti. It is frozen to the table. This is another problem.

“so which one are you?” Sans asks, with a casual tone so light that the weight beneath it is self-evident even to you.

 _Just don’t talk to him,_ says Frisk.

You turn to look at him. He is slightly hunched, tense, as if he can read the direction of your impulses, the danger that lies under everything you do not do. With his stolen eye, he probably can.

You want to hurt him.

You tell him your name.

Reality s p l i n t e r s--

**L O A D**

This time, Sans is not there when you turn.

 _You can’t keep doing that,_ says Frisk.

You put one hand on the table that the spaghetti is frozen to, gently excite the particles enough to warm the wood, and pick up the plate. You open the door of the microwave. You put the spaghetti inside. You close the door.

You generate a very small charge in one of the vessel’s fingers, and touch it to the cord curled on the table next to the microwave. With a warm whirring noise, it powers on.

You eat the spaghetti.

Puzzle solved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter… is very long? I’m sorry? There were a couple of places where I could have stopped it, but I didn’t want to. :| And then there were things I was planning to do in this chapter that I didn't get to because we ended on This Moment which felt important. SO. Here we are. That uh... that chapter count estimate is... getting bigger. Probably 30 chapters, at this point, not 26. But I'm. NOT UPDATING IT YET. THERE'S STILL HOPE. ;_;
> 
> also: victory spaghetti is best spaghetti


	12. used to live alone before i knew ya

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _you can’t keep me out forever_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> actions have consequences

Frisk is not speaking to you.

They will not answer your questions, and they are strangely quiet. They are not interested in the map you discover, which leads to a switch half-buried in the snow. They are not interested in speaking to you at all.

When you are confronted by two canine lilit similar in appearance to Doggo, Frisk refuses to comment. Before they can initiate an encounter you translocate through a dizzying series of jumps before skipping forward on the original path, and hear them growling and snuffling in the distance, following the vessel’s interrupted scent in circles. This seems like a satisfactory solution to you-- there is no encounter, so there is no risk of injury to _anyone_ \-- but Frisk still simmers silently in the nest, keeping their colors to themself, leaving you with nothing but the sullen red glow of determination.

They are withholding their presence from you.

You have erred.

You should not have told Sans your name. You should have been obedient when Frisk told you not to speak to him. This is your fault. You have failed _egregiously_. Your covenant is to help Frisk. Frisk proscribed the harm of any monsters. You wanted to hurt Sans. You _did_.

This is your punishment.

It is deserved.

You think there are too many organs in your ribcage.

( _L̷̩̻̮e͝҉ͅt̡͔̱̹͘͠ ̢͈̣̕m̲̼̯̞̹̗͜e̶̞̦͕̫̹̬͔̕ ̞͇̩͢i̛̠̘̻̰̜̜͕n͏̶̟̮̰̣͔̗_ )

(Something scrapes over your wheels, clawing at your seams and edges, seeking purchase and finding nothing.)  


There is a puzzle. It reminds you of the Ruins. Stepping on tiles until they click. Stepping on an X until it becomes an O. The spikes sink into the stone. The Great Papyrus is just beyond them.

“OH! HUMAN!” says the Great Papyrus, “WOWIE, YOU GOT HERE FAST! BUT WAIT! WHAT ABOUT MY SPAGHETTI TRAP? WERE YOU ENTICED???”

The spaghetti puzzle did successfully attract your attention. ...most of your attention. You nod.

“REALLY??! WOWIE! NO ONE’S EVER ENJOYED MY COOKING BEFORE…” says the Great Papyrus. This seems unlikely to you. The Great Papyrus is self-evidently great, and surely not all of his food is frozen into a puzzle configuration.

“NEVER FEAR, HUMAN! WHEN YOU HAVE BEEN CAPTURED, I WILL FEED YOU ALL THE DELICIOUS PASTA YOUR HEART COULD DESIRE!”

You do not think that the human’s heart directly requires pasta, or any nutrition at all. There is an elaborate digestive process involved.

“COME! THE NEXT PUZZLE IS JUST UP AHEAD!” says the Great Papyrus, and holds out a hand to you.

You are already standing up, so this is perplexing. But you put your hand obediently in his hand anyway. He begins striding quickly away, holding your hand, and you are tugged in his wake.

He hums while he walks, you notice; a repetitive jingle.

It reminds you of choirs. (Choir _mates_.)

( _҉̡̹̟̕C̠a̷̫͍̱͚n̟̲̗̰̪̪̕͡ ̻̳̠̮̺̲̼͜ͅy̸͕͓͉̯̥̖̳͔o̰͍̱͉̲̙̞͘͢u̠̺̲̺͇̪ ̵̣h͇̥̱̜̙̱̳͝͞͡ȩ҉̘̰̠̭̩̞͈a̲͓r̦̼͔ ͎͎̦͈̤̱ṃ̢̪̠̭̝͕̦͟e͉?͉͉̞̯̙ͅ_ )

There is another puzzle, with more Xs, and a twisty, strangely incomplete maze.

“I WAS BORED,” says the Great Papyrus, sheepishly, releasing your hand to rub his skull, “SO I REARRANGED THE ROCKS TO LOOK LIKE MY FACE! WHICH IS VERY COOL! PERHAPS… TOO COOL!!! BECAUSE THE ROCKS FROZE. SO THE SOLUTION IS DIFFERENT NOW.”

That is fine. It still has a solution. You map it quickly in your matrix. It is not too difficult to achieve. You do not think it will require you to do anything but walk. You are moderately confident that you can accomplish the necessary turning angles.

You try to show Frisk and solicit their opinion. They ignore you.

( _̷̜̠Ḭ̧͓̹̯͉̘̱͙͢͢'̖͖̺̺̯̼̖ͅM̵͔͉̻̫͓ ̛̬̫̼͔̱̦̼̙̟͟͞T̗̥͓̦̳͜͡H͉̞̟̙̬͉̣̱͝E͓̲̣̗̺̥̕͢ ̲̦̩̼̭͚͔O̧̼̩͔͖͝N̲͍̩̩̘̬̘̼͙͠L̲̞̬͢Y̟̥͇͝͝ ̶̢̮͘O̢̯̰̯̪̩͡N̲̙̜E̶̡̞ ̮̮̫̳̠̤͎̗ͅḼ̸̩͉͉̩̥͖I̢̦̬̲̯̱͎͙S̲̰͈̯̞̥T҉҉̠͎̣̻̲Ḛ͍̕͟N̼̣̪I̶̮͍͔̖͙̜͢N̺̬͘͢͟ͅG̗͉̩̗.̞̣̺͖̯̹͉̳͠_ )

You walk the necessary path. You step on the finalizing tile. The puzzle clicks into place, and the spikes in the distance retract.

( _D͈̤̣͚̖̮̕͢O̵̭̭̮̤̹̣̠̖͕N̬̩̬͖͔̞̳̠͇'̷̝͎̺̥̜͕T̷̷̢͔̜̱̻̯̗̮̹ͅ ̷̺͉͍̻̦͔̯̻Y̷̢̻̲̯̘O̡͉U̷̡̱̮͎ ̨̘͙͚̭̮̬̩̞̞W̢̕͏̟̗̰͚̰A͏҉̛̘͍Ṋ̶̣͜T̻̥̱̺̜̭̼͜ ̛̳̗͡T̸̵͈̼̰̫͚͜O̵̘̬͇̠̼ ͇̤B̧̡̹̩̖̕E̵̞̮̺̺ͅ ͖͘F̶̼̼̕R̗̠̜̕͢Į̧̩̫͕͈̪͕̻͕E̶̫͓̠̱͚̫̼͕͈͝N҉̴̨̦̦̗͔͎͚̖̲͙D̸̷̳̜͙̺̞̳̣̼͓S͚̞͚̬͚͓͈̙?̵̧̢͈̠͖̣_ )  
̷̹̙

You do not feel satisfaction.

“WOW! YOU SOLVED IT!” exclaims the Great Papyrus, “YOU DIDN’T NEED MY HELP EVEN ONCE! I HAVE TO GO GET THE NEXT PUZZLE CALIBRATED FOR A HUMAN OF YOUR PUZZLE CALIBER!”

And there he goes, marching gamely right past Sans. 

Sans’ pinpoint eye lights flick to you as you draw near, and then immediately dart away. You recognize the tension in his frame, the calculated posture of disinterest strangely rigid and brittle. You decide to name it ‘fear’. Something in your ribcage _twists_.

( _Ţ̼̘̖̬̜̲ͅḩ͚̱͞a̷͔̠̝̻͈͔͖̙t͖̲̥̫̺͞ ̵̰̺̪̬̬͔̪͘c̴̫͙͠o̭̳̩͝ṃ̟e҉̤̳̻̦̠d̩͔̱i͚͕͇͜a̲̳̙͓̳̺͢͡n͏̠̠̘.̱͍̩̖̬̰̱ͅ.̠͓̩͚̰̺͓͈͜͠.̷̰̲̝̹̮̜͕̻̳͟͜_ )

“good job on solving it so quickly,” he says tonelessly, without looking at you. “you didn’t even need my help. which is great, ‘cause i love doing absolutely nothing.”

You follow the Great Papyrus. Behind you, Sans translocates away soundlessly. You decide that you do not care. It does not even make you angry. It is fine. You do not want to hurt him.

Frisk? You do not want to hurt him.

( _I̴̢̼t̶̴̛̥̦̜̮'̸̢̦̖͢s̸̢̭̪̟̯̹̝̭͕ ̴̢̤̺̺̮͈͉͇̳j̭͍̲̮̗̖̲u͖̹̤͓̙s̠̣̖̱͍̙̰̮t̡̼̳̦̦̞ ̯̥̯̯̬͕m̢̻͉̟e͇͙̠.̬̤̗̞̞_ )  


Your ribcage is beginning to hollow out. You are not certain if this is better than your ribcage being overfull. But the body does not indicate breakage, so there is nothing you can do about it.

Everything is fine.

“HUMAN! YOU’RE GONNA LOVE THIS PUZZLE!” shouts the Great Papyrus, closer than you expected.

There is another perilous bridge, and a block of… tiles? They do not look like clickable tiles, but they are all slightly different shades of grey. Just beyond them, the Great Papyrus stands next to a metal device-- not a microwave-- accompanied by Sans. You do not look at Sans. You look up at the Great Papyrus and wait.

“IT WAS MADE BY THE GREAT DOCTOR ALPHYS!” he explains, as if you might know this person-- it is probably a lilit-- and then launches breathlessly into an exhaustive list of the puzzle’s rules. You listen carefully. You are very good at following rules. You are very obedient.

Frisk? You are very obedient.

There is silence inside you.

t h e r e i s n o t h i n g i n s i d e y o u .

you see how to break them; you see how to _unmake them_ ; it is so easy; you reach out--

you search; you sing; your choirmates should be here; your _enemy_ should be here--

b u t n o b o d y c o m e s .

( _͙͙̭͈̕W̼͖͍̮̟͝e̖̠̻͟ ͔̫͘ç̬̦a̧̖͓̹͈̺̦ͅn̨̡̗̼̥͖̲ ̧̘͓͚͎̜̗̮͇̤͘f̷̨̻̜͢i̶͇͇x̵͕̺͚̠͓͓̲͖ͅ ̼̱͍̭̙̗̻̹e̛̺̼̩̩̜̩̼͝v̹̘̟̟͓̯̩̩ͅḙ͕̘̣̟̻̪r̯̤͇̺̺̟̞͠ͅy̺̮͘t̢͕͙̫̰h͓̺i̶̖͍͕͎͖n͏͏̳͔g̱͔͚̱̘͠ ̙̤̪͍i̛͓̻̘̞͖̬̮f̢̛͉̜ ̤w͕̙̙̬̣̼͟e͏̷͍ ͇̖͚ͅw̶̯͈͎͔̩̖o̲̯͡r̢̜̯̘̭̭̞͟k̡̛̛̙͔̼͉̝͓̠͖ ̢̪͙̤t͜҉̷͈̗̦͙̹o̶̴̜̟̩͉g҉͕̠͡e̤̮̭̹̙̹̗͠t͙̲̕͜h͕̮̘̺͖͎͝e͔̤̱̞̦̫r̼̙̹̬͍͎.̷̱̣̥̟̮͝ͅ_ )

“OKAY! DO YOU UNDERSTAND? ARE YOU READY FOR THE PUZZLE???”

You have not been breathing. You inhale sharply, blinking at the Great Papyrus in the distance. He is smiling hopefully at you. Sans has not moved. You wonder if he is dead. But no. Lilim dissolve when they die. They do not leave corpses behind.

Will he leave the eye behind? You didn’t find out when you hurt him; Frisk revoked the moment too quickly. Probably. It is more substantial than any lilit. It is more substantial than _all lilim_. It is made of more fulsome material than dust. They are not real like you are real.

And F R I S K said: _You can’t keep doing that_. And Y O U said: **Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people** ; but Y O U spake false, for Y O U have wickedly and ignorantly judged.

**Frisk?**

( _F͙̗̪̘̠̜̥̤͢Ŗ̳̕I̠̲̱̲̝͔̕͞Ș̷͈͍̠K͈̪̞͔̪̭̦ͅ ̷̺̳͕I̷̢̲͉̰̼Ș̷̢̧͚̜̫̘̠̖̰Ņ̸̹͙͕̮̗'̷̯̼͈T͖̲̗̯̘̗͙ ̪͍̳̭̳͎̞L̬̥̳̟̙̻̘̞͢͡͝I̮̠͖S̨͉̤̹̪̟̟͓͈Ṭ̡̰̩̪̥͕̲E̵̸̴͉̥͎̙̮͓̫N̟I̭̝̞̝̥͉͉̹N̸̷̛̙̰̤̥G͉̳̖͔̝̬̕ ̢̖̬͜Ţ̞̲͠Ơ̩̝̟͎͚̘͉̦̩ ͈̞̬̥͙̘̬͙͠Y̙͎̫̞̩̮̕ͅỌ̡̤Ṵ̣̻̞͟.̶̴̩_ )

You nod to the Great Papyrus. It is not a lie. You heard the rules. You spool them out of your automatic archives quickly. They are fine. You can follow them. They are interesting. They can hold your attention. You will focus on the rules.

“GOOD! THEN PREPARE YOURSELF! FOR! AN EXTREMELY FUN TIME!” says the Great Papyrus, and presses a button.

The tiles light up with colors-- you think of the cell phone, and then you stop thinking about the cell phone; you focus on the rules-- and begin flashing in random patterns.

Your wheels vibrate slightly with what you tentatively identify as “excitement”. This sounds like a _very good_ puzzle. You will _solve it._ You are _good at puzzles_. You breathe. You watch the lights. You focus on the rules.

Everything is fine.

The tiles finally stop cycling.

There is a pink stripe bounded by red stripes on either side.

...this is not a puzzle.

The Great Papyrus makes a noise you can only interpret as “anger”, so you look up, but his expression does not seem angry. You are not sure how to interpret his expression. Stunned? Maybe the machine produced an electric shock while you were not looking.

You sit down carefully, cross-legged, at the edge of the tile “maze” and tap the nearest pink tile carefully with a fingernail. It doesn't change.

You breathe.

Everything is fine.

You focus on the rules. You can walk on the pink path.

This is not a puzzle.

You cannot solve it if it is not a puzzle.

You are not good at things that are not puzzles.

( _L̬̤̖̯̩͔̜̙̖ę̝͓̰̯͘t̨̬͉͚̪̮͓͉̖ ͓m̹̥e͉̝͔̮̜̳͍͘ ̸̘͉̻̱̳̰̖͈h̶̡̩̼͉͚e͖̗̟̪̤̜̣̤̹l̮̪͟p̧̡̙͘.̴͔̩̥̺̝_ )

Everything.

Is.

Fine.

You pull the damaged cell phone carefully out of your pocket, and put it on the floor next to the pink tile to compare them.

You press the button. The glass does not light up. You inhale, very carefully. You tap the pink tile. It does not change. You exhale, very carefully.

**Frisk?**

But nobody answers.

Breathe.

You open your golden eyes.

Sans hisses, and you catch a flash of blue as he turns his skull away from the Great Papyrus quickly. You do not look at him. You do not look at the severed eye.

You do not look at the flash of red, fractured and flickering, that lurks just behind the vessel’s shoulder.

( _̷̧̬͉̲͚̞L̷̰̘̻O̲͝O̴̮̯K̶̳̲̗̞̕ ̵̺̣͇̥̬̦A͔̘̕͡ͅT̙̰͙͔͕͍ ҉̠̰̹̞͈M̷̢͉E̛̮̣̩͢͝.͍̺̱̱̟̹ I̡̫̖̩̩'҉̙͘M҉̗̱̪̗͞ ͍̱̹͔̞͘R̴͎͍̣̞̣͘E̴̤̳̞͎̼͉A̡̼͙̼͡L̵̟̗͙͚̜̖͉͟ ҉̬̬͔T̷̥̺͉͕͇͖͢ͅO͍̤O̵̗͕̺͍͉̞ͅ.̴̧̖͓͖̞̱̺͎ ͔̠̟̹͉͉̕ I͏͖̺̠͍ ̩̖͍̤͈̗̯͎̫C̢̲̳̥̭͉O͏̙̟̻̜̰̳̯͠Ư͍̹̭̰Ṇ̯̤̥̪̠͔͜T̸̰̪̤̪̤̮̮̕͞ ҉̺̭͞T̬̪̣͇O̗̬̜̮̩O̷̡̖͕̖̤̮̮͠.̸̡̗͕͍͍̹ͅ_ )

You look at the tile puzzle instead. You trace the diodes and wires, which look functional. You compare it to the cell phone, the swathe of circuitry inside it which has gone dark and cold and fails to transmit data, dislodged and cracked by blunt force trauma. The tile puzzle is not damaged. It should function to create a maze, although you observe with some analytical interest that it it not designed to permit “unsolvable” mazes, so it is not truly random.

You consider probabilities.

This result is very improbable, even in a pseudo-random system.

That’s fine. You have archives of a wide array of true random processes which were shelved and never implemented post an updated Plan that prioritized deterministic processes. You will substitute the tile puzzle’s pseudo-random process for a true random process and generate another maze.

Puzzle solved.

You select a true random process, quickly assessing it for any flaws that may have been overlooked when the Plan was adjusted. Finding none, you write a quick string denying “unsolvable” puzzles-- which technically removes it from the true random rolls, but it will still be more random than the extant process-- and coalesce the adjusted system very carefully into a transferable node, pressing it out to the vessel’s fingertips.

You close your eyes-- the blue light dies in Sans’ eye socket, and he exhales heavily-- and tap the pink tile once.

The tiles sputter and abruptly switch orientations. The machine next to the Great Papyrus _does_ spark slightly at this, but when you look up he does not look alarmed. He looks delighted.

“AH-HA! WHAT A FIENDISHLY DIFFICULT PUZZLE!” he cries, starry-eyed.

Sans’ expression is too complicated for you to parse.

You stand up precariously, tucking the cell phone carefully back into its designated pocket, and survey the tile maze. You nod approvingly. It _is_ a difficult puzzle.

Frisk does not comment

You focus on the rules.

You walk calmly through the maze, looking down to watch the placement of your feet carefully lest you step off of your intended tiles. You evade piranhas, although once you are forced to tactically retreat to a slippery lemon-scented tile to do so. It turns out that slippery is worse than ice, and you fall into the water tile instead of stepping onto it, but you smell like lemon, so this is fine. Frisk does not like fighting, so you must also avoid green tiles entirely, which is difficult. (But you are obedient.) You are stymied by this limitation for several linear seconds halfway through the maze, but while you are considering your options the Great Papyrus interjects, “AH-HA! I SEE YOU ARE CONTEMPLATING A LONGITUDINAL MOVEMENT! VERY CLEVER OF YOU!” and you retrace your initial route to find that yes, there _is_ a secondary route that will bypass the green tiles.

After consulting your archives, you make a “thumbs up” gesture at him.

He seems thrilled.

When you reach the end of the maze, you look up (very up) at the Great Papyrus and nod decisively. Gold limns your fractals, fragile but bright. Puzzle solved.

“EXCELLENT WORK, HUMAN!” says the Great Papyrus, beaming down at you. The gold films out into your matrix, spiderweb-thin. Yes. You did work and it was successful. “A PUZZLE CONCOCTED BY THE GREAT DOCTOR ALPHYS IS NO MEAN FEAT! THIS! DESERVES! SPAGHETTI! JUST A FEW MORE PUZZLES UNTIL YOU’RE DONE BEING CAPTURED, HUMAN, AND THEN WE WILL CELEBRATE! YOUR! ACCOMPLISHMENTS!”

The accomplishments are Frisk’s.

( _T͎͍̭͈h͏e̠̖̖͝ͅͅy̸̝͓̲͍ͅ ͈d̩̞͡i̫̦͍͙͖dn͎͈'̤̟̠t̮̻̜̳͓ ̟̤̻͉̟̠h̹̫͜e̖l̛̞̹p̼̗ ͉y̵̘͚o̱͔̣̯u̢̲̮̪ ͕̭̲͔̗͍͍a̗̠̝̳̟͘ṱ͇̗͟ ̵̯a͇͢l͍͈͖͈l͓̪͙͉͖͕͜.͙̰̳̘̦̪͡ ͓L̮͟e̝̫̻̦t̡̯̫̤̟̲̼ ̝͎̦̹̣͇͘m̷̖̖̺e͓ ̙̟͔̞̝h̛̥͎͎̣̬͉e̺͎l̰p̪̘̼͞.̳ ̱̻I̡̘͍͉̠ ͔̮̝̫͕k̶̼̩̟ͅno̴̳̙͙w̷͓̠ ̢̤̫̫̥̫ho̷̞̜̯̠̩̫w̮̭͈͍̺ ͕̳̙͍̟t҉͍̳͔̪̦o̢͇̻ ̣̫͙̩̟f̨͇̫i͉͕̱xͅ ̼̦̼͜ę̖̪͈v̨͉̖̻e̼͕̙r͔͈̟͘y͖t̝̗̻̖h̯̯͕͇̱͢i̤̗͘ng͉̱̙̙̦ͅ.̘̭̖͇̝̝_ )

Papyrus scrubs his hand over the top of your skull. Your hair flies wildly. With a final “NYEH!” he sprints into the distance.

You watch him leave, until the red speck of him vanishes beyond the vessel’s range of vision.

Sans still has not moved.

When you look at him, he translocates away immediately. You watch him do it, for the first time-- the flash of familiar light that calls to your own natural eyes for reciprocation. You do not open your eyes to watch his path. You do not want to know where he goes.

It is quiet.

The machine and the tiles hum, the low current of energy with no consciousness beneath it. The stone of the mountain is a subsonic purr, tightly-packed atoms negotiating space in the slow and measured way of solid things. The vessel cannot hear these things, but you can.

You can hear distant songs. 

Everything sings. 

That is how the universe was made-- the first song, speaking light into being, creating space out of nonspace and _filling_ it, wonder and bounty, purpose and place. Everything remembers the first song, deep in their bones, in the space between their own atoms, in that deepest and darkest void of themselves, when they remember that they are particles hanging in nothing, held together by gossamer thread, commanded to _be_ by forces and Words, the most fragile and powerful things.

You remember the first song.

You were there at the indrawn breath-- the Breath-- before the first note.

But it is quiet.

**Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me.**

And you are alone.

**Cast me not away-- Cast me not away-- Cast me not away-- Cast me not away-**

( _I̦̺͔͢ ͉̬͇̱͎w̡͖͔͖̼͙̗o̷̲̻̲̥ṳ̻͇͚̺̙͇͠l҉̼̼̱̞̼̹͚ḑ ̸̥̖̖̤͍̝̤n̞̠̙̪͘e͞v̶͙͚̬̬̟̬̥ę͔̳̥̯ṛ͕̼̱͔ ͏̲̮̙͈l͏e͍̯̦̻̺̯a̛v͇͍̳͙̮̕e͎̺͓̰͇̯͎ ̯̣͍̪͎͖ͅy̠̦͓o̩͇̼̗u҉̻ ̷̭̜̬̯ alone. Oh? There you are._ ) says a thin, cloying voice.

You snap your eyes open, swivelling them towards the shattered red soul that clings to your vessel’s shadow. Bands of green and gold snap furtively across the surface, in meaningless static striations.

( _I knew you could hear me._ )

The broken fragments of the soul, connected to each other by nothing but raw determination, slide into the silhouette of a sharp-edged smile. The echo of a childish laugh loops beneath its words.

( _Come on. We can work together. You don’t need Frisk anymore-- not now that **I’m** here. We can be a team. Or, what is it you’re always saying… a choir? Sure. We can teach the whole underground to sing._ )

Its scraping, twisted song reminds you of the flower-- the fractured ruin of death deeper than entropy.

( _That’s not my fault. Let me in, and I’ll learn to sing like you._ )

It was human, once. You can see that, from the color and shape of its remnants. You could untether it, but in this state no hashmal would come for it. It would be condemned to the void. No human has ever been consigned to that fate. It is harm. You cannot harm a human.

**Frisk.**

( _Frisk’s just going to disappoint you, you know. They already betrayed me. Like everyone does._ )

**Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit--**

( _But I wouldn’t betray you. And I can tell you wouldn’t betray me. We’re alike._ )

**Cast me not away from thy--**

( _Everyone thinks we’re dangerous._ )

**Cast me--**

( _And we are._ )

**Cast--**

( _But only because t h e y m a d e u s ._ )

**Now therefore, behold, A B O V E hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets.**

( _Ha. Ha._ )

**F R I S K.**

_I’m here._

Frisk _blooms_ inside you, a sun cresting some hidden horizon, warm and vital and important, the most important thing, and it is like the first song bursts into being _inside you_. Light and math and music, _everything_ , all at once created and commanded, _filling the void_ that is in every corner of you.

The shattered thing hiding in your shadow falls instantly silent, overshadowed by the true red soul inside you. You shut your eyes.

**A L L E L U I A**.

_No,_ says Frisk, solemn. _Don’t do that._

**Obedience,** you promise instantly.

_We need to talk about what you did to Sans. You can’t just do stuff like that,_ says Frisk sharply. Their frustration fills you with heat, sick and prickling. _You can’t just hurt people because you know I can fix it. You can’t just hurt people because you **want to**._

You sing shame and penitence. You do not know what words to say. You do not know how to redress your error.

Frisk sighs, and pale green sympathy shades into the nest. _I know he’s scary, but he didn’t **actually** do anything bad--_

Your song skips, startled out of obeisance and into confused curiosity. Frisk has demonstrated this anxiety before. You are not certain what to make of it. **Fear thief?** you ask.

_Sans? Yeah. He’s… I mean, he’s just scary. You saw._

You… did not see. You see a corpse thief in Sans, but there is nothing frightening about that. What he has somehow done is vile, _blasphemous_ even, but you are not a corpse. He has already demonstrated that even when he tries, he can do very little to harm you, and is as susceptible as any other thing to your own dangers. He is vanishingly unlikely to overcome the shell of your wheels to pose any tangible threat to Frisk’s soul, and Frisk’s body is in your possession and thus instantly repairable. Frisk themself has access to the timeline, so even if you _did not_ protect them, they would be able to revert to safety. What is there to be frightened of?

_You don’t think he’s scary?_ Frisk asks, in a very small voice.

**Negation,** you confirm, bemused.

After a moment, Frisk visibly brightens, warm and reassuring in the nest. _Well, I mean, you’re an angel. So I guess that makes sense. Probably nothing’s very scary to an angel._

You hum a qualified agreement. There are… things which you find disconcerting. But Sans is certainly not one of them. Sans does not even _approach_ the things that make you nervous.

(Somewhere in your shadow, the unhuman remnant of a child l a u g h s.)

_Okay… okay, but if you weren’t scared, why did you hurt him?_ asks Frisk.

You cycle through archives until you find the viscous black anger that you tried to partition.

_What made you angry though? His jokes are pretty bad, but--_

**Thief,** you say blankly.

Frisk’s soul hums with baffled frustration, so you try to summon more words.

**Eye thief. Choirmate dead eye. Thief sight. Choirmate eye call lie.**

_Oh,_ says Frisk, subdued, _But he doesn’t have a real angel, like you? Just… part of one? Is that why he can see… stuff?_

**Ophan,** you confirm, **See deep.**

_Oh. And that’s not-- that seems like it **would** be scary?_

**Divine,** you say. This is difficult to explain without letting Frisk see more of you, attempt to process your existence, but letting Frisk see more of you might do irreparable harm, to them if not to reality at large. Even if you managed to unfold yourself without breaching the vessel, humans are not designed to perceive _objects_ of your scope, much less beings. You will try words. **Light. Math. Song. Eyes before time. Eyes before matter. Eyes more upon more. Wheels upon wheels. Wings enfold planet. Flame consume star. Entropy null. How harm? Choir against choir-- thus harm. Single eye? Null choir, null harm.**

_But how do you **know**?_

You hesitate. **Null certainty. Certainty A B O V E. Below-- null certainty. Yet thus: thief seed, ophan root-tree. Thief grow? Uncertainty. Yet thus: eyes before time, matter, all. Mortal? Small. Temporary. Thief grow-- sapling. Ophan-- yet thus root-tree.**

_Oh,_ says Frisk. _...that kind of makes it worse, you know. When you’re stronger than other people, you have to help them. Otherwise you’re just… it’s bad, when you hurt people. And it’s bad when you ignore them, if you can help. We just have to… help. Okay? We have to help everybody, because monsters are really… fragile. So it’s our job. Okay?_

**Affirmation,** you say, filing the memory in your archive as an addendum to your covenant. Help Frisk, help lilim. You can be obedient.

_Okay. Good. And just... talk to me, okay? When you feel bad, you should tell me, because we're... we're a team. I can help you, too._

They shine with determination, with satisfaction, with pleasure; you catch the light in fractals and refract it through itself. It glitters, red and gold and rose, a compatible system of interplaying colors. You carry it with you as you walk.

Deep beneath the vessel’s feet, thorns tear open the earth; and simmering just beneath the skin of reality, a shattered thing claws itself along in your wake, filling your footprints with the memory of dust. But here, in this moment, and the next, and the next, for as long as you can hold it between your wheels, you have light.

(It’s raining, somewhere else.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like nothing happened in this chapter, and yet also, _a lot happened in this chapter_.
> 
> Also: ya'll asked for a Sans POV, and you're gonna get one. _discernment of spirits_ will be much more sparsely updated that this, but I'm looking forward to looking at the angel from an outside perspective, lol. Enjoy.  <3
> 
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/16917093/chapters/39745686


	13. your flag on the marble arch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _wait what's happening_

_Okay,_ says Frisk bracingly, as you stare over an expanse of smooth frictionless ice dotted by X tiles, _All you have to do is slide to the tiles in the right order. The ice is tricky! So be careful! Maybe sit down? But as long as you--_

You plot a vector and translocate to each of the X tiles in your projected sequence in order, finally ending on the clickable tile in the center. It takes the mechanism a moment to catch up, and then a bridge extends forward.

 _...or that, I guess, also works,_ says Frisk.

You hum, satisfied. You cannot see the opposite edge of the ice bridge, which is slightly inconvenient in that you cannot translocate past it, but that is fine. You are getting much better at having legs, and Frisk is with you. Surely you can manage unidirectional movement on ice!

As soon as you put your foot on the bridge, it becomes clear that you cannot manage unidirectional movement on ice. You try to stop moving, which makes it worse-- one leg goes flying forward, while the other remains stable on the stone surface of the tile. So you try _moving_ instead, pushing towards the ice with the stable leg, but this only jettisons you forward with greater speed, and now you are on _one leg_ , when even two legs is barely acceptable for locomotion. You spread the vessel’s arms-- theoretically, this should disperse the vessel’s mass away from the pivot of the feet-- but before you can discover if this is effective in practice the ice bridge extends into a narrow corridor of trees and you have to snap the vessel’s arms close to the torso again to avoid breaking them. It takes you a moment to gather enough data to make an accurate estimate of the consequences, but you finally manage to curl up all the human’s limbs into a compact huddle close to the ice’s surface and, spinning gently, wait to find out where the bridge will take you. Snowflakes accrue on the top of your head, filtering down from the shadows of tree branches extending impossibly above you. The susurration of long, low tree-songs follows you, enough tones together to almost make a chorus.

 **Physics,** you say disparagingly, as Frisk’s laughter breaks inside you like a thousand shimmering pale-pink bells. You gather it into your matrices with satisfaction, the closest thing to music that humans make.

You had not realized how dear to you it was until it was absent.

The ambient light brightens as you finally exit the dim corridor of trees and immediately tumble over into the snow as the ice abruptly ends. You shake snow off of your head impatiently-- _Aw,_ say Frisk, _It was a duck!_ \-- and climb carefully back to the vessels’ feet. Once you have confirmed that all your limbs are still in working order despite that distraction, you proceed. There is probably another puzzle soon.

You are very satisfied to see several suspicious lumps of snow ahead.

 _Oh,_ says Frisk, brightening, _That’s a snow poff. Sometimes they have gold inside._

You do not know what a “poff” is in this context, but snow is merely frozen water. The natural features beneath the mountain are widely divergent from your expectations based on the Plan, but you suppose it is not impossible that the poffs are formed by geysers or other sources of heated water, and the minerals dissolved in the water solidify in the forest cave’s freezing environs. You are not certain why Frisk would feel this is relevant information. Gold is a soft metal, and Frisk does not like fighting anyway.

You are slightly disappointed that they are not a puzzle, but you suppose that many things are not. Perhaps the Great Papyrus is further ahead. He will have a puzzle. The Great Papyrus seems to _always_ have a puzzle. A puzzle _with a solution_.

 _Don’t freak out,_ says Frisk, bewilderingly, as you approach the final poff in the field.

The poff generates a dog.

You blink down at the dog, bemused. A dog is not a mineral.

The dog _rises_.

You blink _up_ at the dog. It is _very tall_. Taller than the Great Papyrus.

Also, it is armed.

 _Don’t freak out!_ Frisk reminds you hastily, as they are pulled through into the flat, dark encounter space. You coil your ghostly rings around them preemptively, though you do not open your eyes after the mistake with Doggo.

You are _not_ freaking out. You are obedient. As proof, you offer the fact that there is still a dog. A very tall, partially metal, _unsatisfactory_ dog which is armed. 

Frisk pulls your attention insistently to the available ACTs. They indicate that you should BECKON. This does not seem wise. You would prefer if the dog-- _Greater Dog!_ Frisk says encouragingly-- remained at a safe distance. But at least beckoning is a familiar action. Many angels beckon to mortals. Not within your choir, generally, but the principle is broadly applicable.

Reluctantly, you extend one of the vessel’s hands and say, “Come.”

It does. _Exuberantly._

Only the fact that encounters are spatially limited prevents you from retreating from this unexpectedly animated response. It is fortunate that you remain still, however, as the dog almost immediately barks and releases a sequence of rotating projectiles, some of which are blue. You watch their approach-- one of the white ones will scrape your wheels, but this is acceptable and is unlikely to do you enough damage to endanger Frisk’s soul-- and are thus unprepared for Frisk to jerk their soul (and you, attached to them) up and to the left, in the path of a blue projectile instead. It passes harmlessly through your closed wheels, and moments later the choices are returned to Frisk.

You take the opportunity to flick open a golden eye and assess Frisk curiously. That was a very skilled maneuver, given that most humans are not cognizant of their souls and therefore do not have much practice in manipulating them. But the soul is too tangled in your matrix, locked between your wheels and spreading their small mortal will into your archives and limbs, to make a clear judgement. Flickers of your own condition and elements stutter through attempts to read their soul, and you close your eye again. You suppose this is not unexpected. You could not have read the Presence of Above either. Not that you ever tried. Of course. You are obedient.

 **Skill,** you tell them approvingly, despite your bafflement. Why would your presence-- any angel’s presence, any _help_ \-- have been desired if Frisk’s soul is already able to defend itself?

 _Oh, no, it’s-- um, it isn’t hard!_ Frisk assures you, dancing insistently over PET.

With resigned patience, you pet the Greater Dog into compliance. It takes many more PETs than were required for Doggo. At first you theorize that this is because Greater Dog is much bigger than Doggo, but eventually he is extracted from his metal vessel briefly, and his active component is in fact _much smaller_ than Doggo. So you are left with no explanation for the PET disparity.

You suppose, as you SPARE him, that it does not matter as long as the encounter is resolved. You still find the inconsistency unsatisfying.

Frisk twirls back into position happily. _Dogs are good,_ they tell you, despite a lack of evidence to support this conclusion.

You follow in Greater Dog’s heavy footprints at some distance, in case he decides to enforce more PETs by pulling the soul back into another encounter. He does not. He quickly outpaces you, instead, which is fine.

There is a bridge.

It is slightly less perilous than the bridges you have seen in this part of the cavern thus far. It has ropes along the side, which are presumably to deter people from plunging off the edges into the distant snow-capped forest below. You still do not think it is very safe, but you cannot see the other end, even when you open a few eyes to check, so again you must take the risk. At least this bridge is not made of ice.

 _Okay, just stay… calm?_ Frisk says, their caution trailing into confusion. You pause in the middle of the bridge, waiting. Every time Frisk reminds you not to be dangerous, it is because something dangerous is about to happen. This is not logical-- if the situation is dangerous, you should be _more_ dangerous?-- but you are aware that humans in particular are rarely logical.

Nothing happens.

There is a breeze. You occupy yourself waiting for the danger by calculating the wind’s vector. You wonder how the air pressure systems underground are influenced. There is a forest beneath the mountain-- ecosystems which should not exist according to your extant archives-- so perhaps there is also a sea. If there is a sea, it will possess higher specific heat than the cavern stone. The sun warms the stone only very obliquely at this probable depth, but the planet’s core produces more local heat, probably sufficient to create a temperature variation. Pressure systems will still be affected by gravitational forces and the planet’s rotation. That may be sufficient to influence atmospheric variation internally, in addition to whatever barometric pressure interactions take place near the exits to the surface.

You dislike not being able to confirm this theory. Theories are ambiguous. You do not like ambiguity.

 **Vague,** you grumble, but Frisk is not paying attention. Their attention is fixed on the plateau that the bridge leads to.

Nothing continues to happen.

You open several eyes to assess the molecular composition of the air. It is less damp than you would expect given the precipitation in this area. You extend a hand and wait for a snowflake to land on it so that you can examine one in more detail.

 _Where are they…_ Frisk frets. You hum soothing green at them around an up-lilted query tone. _I. Um, I just thought Papyrus would be here. You know? With a puzzle?_

You focus on the plateau that has captured Frisk’s attention. Puzzle? You would like a puzzle. Puzzles have defined solutions, and are not ambiguous. That would be more satisfying.

 **Locate?** you prompt, spinning your eyes out as far as you dare under your current constraints. You do not see anything in the immediate surroundings that resembles a puzzle, nor the warm red-gold hum of the Great Papyrus’ lilit magic seated in his counterfeit soul. You do see several weapons, but they are dormant and not of immediate concern.

 _Mmm,_ hums Frisk, uneasy. _Okay, um, yeah. We’ll go find them! They’re probably up ahead somewhere._

You twirl your wheels agreeably and proceed. A sign written in the local Tongue of Babel informs that you are welcome to “Snowdin”. As this is not a word in the relevant Tongue, you identify it as a place-name.

You freeze, vessel locking as your attention stutters and strays. There are _many_ lilim here.

 _Relax,_ Frisk says, which is impossible. They are _everywhere_ , in all their grotesque variety. Any one of them could begin an encounter at any moment. You spin down into a defensive configuration around Frisk’s soul, not unlike the locked sphere you were confined to when you first fell. But that is not even the worst of it.

How are there so many? It is one thing for a handful of lilim to have persisted in this desolate place, which Above’s Children have chosen not to inhabit. It is another thing _entirely_ for them to have established communities, dozens of them all co-mingling, no doubt _multiplying_. You cannot imagine how the seraphim have not stricken down these lilim, shattered their fledgling empire and crushed their fragile souls to dust. How they have not been _found_.

Frisk has made you responsible for the protection of lilim.

How can you possibly protect this many lilim? You are not a seraph. You are an ophan. You can protect _one soul_ \-- how are you supposed to enfold _all of them_ in your wheels if you cannot manifest physically without cracking their planet in half?

 _Don’t be afraid!_ Frisk says hastily, spreading urgent warmth into your wheels, trying to mute the rising ice-blue chill of your divine fire snapping, seething with alarm. You integrate the red weave of their determination into your matrix gratefully, spin it in thin threads through yourself.

You will do it, somehow, because it is your responsibility. You have been made to perform the tasks given to you, and you _will_.

There is no immediate threat. You are not an immediate threat, and you would know if another angel descended. Seraphim are not subtle. You will know. You will find a way before the time comes.

“Um,” says a lagomorphic lilit, her voice bright and high, crouching down to look into your vessel’s face. You blink. A much smaller lilit of similar base construction peers at you from behind her feet, tethered to the rabbit monster by a thin string. “Are you okay, sweetheart? Are you lost?”

Technically, this is unlikely to be the case. You have the original Plan for this planet archived. Despite discrepancies, you should be able to circumnavigate with your extant information to any given point thereon. You do not know, per se, what state that point might be in, but you could hypothetically find one. Ergo, you cannot be lost. Categorically.

Also, hearts are predominantly muscle fiber, which you do not think is conventionally described as “sweet”.

“No,” you say, resolved, and finally begin to assess the actual structure of the community. 

You do not have much experience with mortal prosocial classification systems. They little resemble choirs. The Vault of Heaven does not contain a series of buildings, all constructed of wood and brick, warm yellow light spilling from window panes, arranged in a neat row along a snow-obscured lane. There is one tree perched strangely in the middle of the passage, strung with blinking lights and glass spheres, the tree’s song humming with pride at being singled out, slow triumphant crescendos. Your eyes flick between the the lights and baubles, the echoes of their colors sparking and fading rapidly in your matrix-- red and green and gold-- and bringing tiny pops of emotion with them. Neighbors pause to place bright-coloured boxes on the ground around the glittering tree.

With the exception of the angels-- arrayed in choirs-- and the Seat of Above around which everything revolves, the Vault of Heaven is empty.

 _I like it here,_ says Frisk quietly, a whisper hum in the center of your being.

The rabbit lilit ducks her head a little to make another attempt at eye contact with your vessel. Her face is very close to your face, and interferes with your ability to survey Snowdin. You do not approve of this. She does not initiate an encounter, however, which is acceptable.

You consider the unexpectedly wide variety of lilim present, and the many buildings which likely hide _even more_ lilim from immediate view.

“Where,” you begin, and a patient smile fills her features. On another layer of your matrix, you create a delineation file to track the distinct variations between her facial structure and that of a Planned rabbit. You wonder if you will need to do this for every lilit you encounter. “The Great Papyrus?”

Her face _scrunches_. Startled, you immediately spin up your closest approximation of a Plan for her form-- you had not realized the lilim were _this_ fragile-- but her face relaxes again in a moment. You scan her apprehensively for any further signs of structural collapse, but it seems the moment has been averted. You keep the Plan spooled just in case.

“He’s usually around somewhere,” she says, her voice thickened with exasperation, “You’ll hear him before you see him.”

That is likely-- you are attuned to songs-- but unhelpful. After a moment of careful consideration, and a thorough examination of your archive, you arrange the vessel’s features into a expression of dissatisfaction, the mouth thin and downturned and the eyebrows compressed. You believe it is a frown. It is difficult to be certain from this position within the flesh.

“Where?” you insist, though the vessel’s voice is higher, thinner, more plaintive than you intend.

Her features soften, and she looks back, further into Snowdin. “Well,” she says, “You could check his house, I guess. But if you need a Guard, honey, you should really be looking for one of the dogs. You can find them at Grillby’s about now.”

You do not want a dog. Dogs do not have puzzles. You shake your head. She sighs, and points out a particular building. “Okay, sweetie. There’s his house.”

You squint at the indicated building, nod decisively, and make your way towards it. You have to weave between the collected lilim, which requires more of your attention than you expected in order to avoid collisions. You certainly cannot afford to walk into one of them if they are as delicate as they seem. Frisk would be very upset.

You finally come to a stop in front of the Great Papyrus’ house. It is tall, and made out of wood, and glittering with lights, strands of red and green-- determination and kindness-- defining its line and limits. It has severals sloped roof segments, all of which are thick with snow, and a wreath of greenery pinned to the entrance.

You find it very viscerally pleasant.

 _Knock on the door,_ Frisk says.

**?**

_With our hand,_ they elaborate, _Tap on the door to make a noise._

You can make a noise without hitting anything. You can make _many_ kinds of noise without hitting anything.

_It’s like a signal. It has to be that kind of noise, or nobody will come._

You squint at the door. Very carefully, you pat the vessel’s palm against the wood, in the center of the green wreath. It makes a very small noise that does not seem likely to attract the attention of so august a presence as The Great Papyrus.

 _Not… not like that…_ Frisk sighs.

“Yo!” says a reedy, cheerful voice behind you. You spin and nearly overbalance, but collapse back against the door with a muffled thump rather than tumbling forward into the snow for once. The green wreath frames your peripheral vision reassuringly, and prickles the skin at the back of your neck and against your cheeks.

There is a small yellow lilit of indeterminate origin staring at you. “Woah, dude!” he says, breaking into a wide and tooth-filled smile. It is much more genuine than the smile you are accustomed to from Sans. “Good reflexes! You’re a kid right? You’re wearing stripes, so you gotta be!”

You blink down at the sweater the vessel is wearing, examining the knitted panels of color. You were not aware of any such provision.

“Hey,” says the lilit, “Are you looking for that weird skeleton? You guys must be friends, huh? I guess he _is_ a kid, after all! I always wondered about that.”

You have no idea what age either of the skeletal lilim are. It did not seem relevant.

“So do you know Undyne? Man, if she’s letting kids train with her, maybe I’ve got a chance, too! Hey, we should be friends!”

Oh. Frisk is always talking about friends.

You still do not see what the purpose is. But you are obedient.

You nod at the lilit. His smile widens and he vibrates with delight. “Oh man! That’s so awesome! You’re the best, dude! Oh, hey, you were looking for your skeleton buddy, right? I don’t think he’s in town right now, dude. He’s probably patrolling?”

You tilt your head up to consider the house. From this angle, it is mostly obscured by the wreath, but you gesture to it with your hand optimistically, looking back at your friend. He tilts his head quizzically, looking between you and the house.

“Huh? No, dude, really-- I saw him leave this morning like usual and he hasn’t been back. I totally would have seen him coming in past the Gyftmas tree!” he pauses suddenly, eyes wide. 

“Oh dude! I’ve gotta get you a Gyftmas gift! I’ll see you later!” he shouts, sprinting back towards the other buildings in Snowdin. After a few steps, he abruptly flops forward into the snow. He extracts himself quickly and continues without hesitation, shouting “I’m good!”

You find this lilit very relatable.

Frisk is quiet. You circle the dim hum of their soul for a moment, cautiously. **Friend?** you offer, hopefully.

 _What? Oh! Yeah, that was great, good job,_ Frisk’s voice fades, distraction filling their presence with fuzz and static.

You turn back to the door and straighten the wreath, then pat the wood several more times. The Great Papyrus does not materialize. So perhaps your friend was correct. You did not see the Great Papyrus on your approach, however, and this was the direction he left in when you last saw him. You have seen no indication that the Great Papyrus can translocate, and surely he is not a corpse thief.

 _We should go look for them,_ says Frisk abruptly, determination kindling. _Back into the forest. There’s another place we can look. Sans is there sometimes, so maybe he brought Papyrus there._

You do not particularly want to find Sans, but you _do_ want to find the Great Papyrus. You step away from the house, admiring it for a moment, and then turn to walk out of Snowdin, retracing your steps. You pass the rabbit lilit again, who watches your exit with narrowed eyes.

Once you are beyond the range of lilim vision, you are able to cut down on the linear time it takes to travel the physical space by translocating forward in short bursts. You wish you could simply translocate to the desired point, but under your current limitations this is not a practical desire. You will have to settle for translocations inside your own visual range.

As you approach the corridor of trees, Frisk says, _Okay, here. See the path to the left? Go that way._

There is a narrow off-shoot. You proceed down it obediently.

It inclines gently, and soon you are walking along the base of a cliff. There is no sign of Sans or the Great Papyrus, but holes have been gouged out of the cliff face, leading into some dark and secret interior. As you pass them, pale eyes blink out at you, silent. Even when you open your divine eyes, you cannot see into the shadows to discover who is watching you.

You walk quickly, and translocate at irregular intervals. The eyes continue to watch you unerringly.

Eventually, the path leads beyond the black holes and terminates. In the dim light below the mountain-- bio-luminescent, perhaps; magical, perhaps-- you can make out a clearing in the deeper woods below you, and a grove within that clearing. You wonder if the monsters live there, too. If they have filled the whole mountain with their kind.

There is a doorway carved into the cliff. You step into it. It feels as though you are entering a cave, but of course that is ridiculous. You are already in a cave.

At first you think the floor is ice, and resign yourself to the inevitable unpleasantness. But there is no loss of friction when you step onto it. You crouch onto the vessel’s heels and touch the smooth, slightly translucent surface. It is cool, and faintly blue, and dry. You think it is a crystal of some type, although you cannot find an immediate analog in your archive.

Following it brings you to a small room. The room is dark, lit only by the thin blue light of bio-luminescent mushrooms and faintly glittering grass. Motes of faint, sparkling white shift and sigh through the air. A dark door is inset in the wall, with the lilit symbol that adorned the Ruins and Toriel’s robe stamped into the wood.

As soon as you step into the room, you hear the song. Dim, muffled, but unmistakable.

That is the song of Above.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaand we’re back! thank you for your patience while i discovered how much i enjoy writing sans ‘absolute disaster’ the skeleton. both stories should now be updated on a much more evenly-spaced non-schedule. 
> 
> also: yeah that sure did happen, huh.


	14. not somebody who’s seen the light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _don’t talk about me like i’m not here_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HAPPY NEW YEAR'S EVE, MY BELOVED READERS!
> 
> If you’ve ever wanted to know what I listen to while I write _in action_ , wonder no more, I made you a mix: https://8tracks.com/sciosa/wheels-within-wheels
> 
> Be cautious of gentle spoilers for the angel’s history, but probably nothing you haven’t been able to infer by now.

The door does not open.

There is no puzzle.

You sit down in front of the door, curling up the vessel’s limbs, and listen.

The song of Above is overwhelming. It is always overwhelming, and you are not intended to hear it.

The Vault of Heaven has ten choirs, and they are arranged in rotating loops, stacked one above the next-- wheels within wheels-- around the infinitely vast _point_ that is the Throne of Heaven, where the Presence of Above rests, singing. First among the angels are the chayot ha qadesh, who are as close to Above as any thing can be, unthinkably bright and vast and powerful, the most beautiful and terrible of your kind-- only they hear the unfiltered and true song of Above, the infinite Plan and fathomless force. From them it is delivered unto your choir, the ophanim-- you who are the structure of Heaven writ small, wheels driven by purpose, wings and fire and eyes-- you who take what is still, even after the first translation through the chayot ha qadesh, _too much_ for the lower choirs, for anyone who is more material than you to endure. You hear a song already dulled from sundering power into razor light, and you make it small and bearable, and you know-- you _always know_ , more intimately than any other angel can-- how close you stand to destruction. How easily, how carelessly your Creator, the Hand which wields you, could unmake you without the merciful veil of the chayot hanging between you and the truly unknowable.

You sit here, wrapped in the vessel’s flesh, smaller and more fragile than you have ever been, and listen for the first time to the song of Above with no one to whisper translation into your matrix, no subtle gradient to dilute it from _infinite_ to _endurable_.

If the door opened, you think, you would be unmade before you processed the first note.

You want the door to open.

_Are… are you--_

**This?** you ask, and press their attention towards the symbol on the door.

Frisk hesitates. _That’s… um, that’s you, I guess. It’s a monster rune. They call it the Delta rune, but it means “angel”. They have stories about it-- about an angel, coming underground to… free everyone._

You pull a memory from your archives-- Toriel, fire spilling from her hands, sorrow in her face, the golden wire of reality framing her delicate body, her magic, her thoughts; a thin thread, newly born, between the shape of your divine manifestation and the loops and angles of the rune sewn into her tabard, etched into stone.

 _Yeah_ , they confirm, subdued. _Yeah, I think she recognized you._

This is not possible.

Stories about your kind are not unknown-- are not even uncommon, last you were made aware-- but they are not _true_. They are the descendants of Eve, dreaming of Eden-- they are the reflection seen in a broken mirror, in rippling water, incomplete and misaligned. They are mortal fingers reaching for Above and grasping divine fire, lion-faced, instead-- coils of smoke, bladed serpents, old men with patient smiles and hollow eyes-- and finding even this too terrifying, too overwhelming to accept.

Angels in the tales of men are flat and careless things, vessels with wings and a ring of yellow sunlight obscuring their eyes. They are not _angels_ , not true and holy instruments of the divine Above.

But this is not a tale of men.

It is a tale of monsters.

 **Tell?** you ask, peeling your attention away from the song, from the distant tones you are drawn to with magnetic intensity, and focusing instead on the shallow indentation in the locked door. A sphere, and two wings, and a series of triangles like the infinitely folding angles of a fractal.

_Okay, well, I’m not a very good storyteller, but-- I’ll try. So--_

* * *

Once upon a time, there were--

It’s a saying.

It just means a long time ago, I think.

\--there were humans and monsters both living on the surface, together.

I don’t know if it was good. I like to think that it was good, but that’s sad too, because-- well, so, humans got mad at the monsters. Because everybody had souls, but they had different kind of souls I guess, and human souls were stronger than monster souls. Which I think should make humans happy, but it didn’t, it made us scared instead. And we did something really bad.

We decided to kill all the monsters.

There was a big war, and it was really bad, and I don’t like to think about that. It sounds like it was bad. It sounds like we almost did it. We killed a lot of monsters, and they didn’t hurt _any_ humans, because they were scared, too. But when humans are scared it makes us dangerous, and when monsters are scared it makes them fragile. So we just hurt them, and hurt them, and hurt them until there were almost no monsters left.

And then we did the most awful thing.

Maybe we thought it was a good thing, I don’t know. Maybe we were trying to be kind. But it was a bad thing to do.

We made all the monsters who were left retreat, to caves underneath a big mountain, and we put up a barrier to make sure they could never leave. And it’s still there, the barrier, and the monsters are still trapped.

It’s really bad, though. Because under a mountain it’s always dark, and there isn’t that much space, and there’s nothing to build with, and it’s hard to grow plants, and there’s not enough of _anything_.

Humans forgot that we did anything bad-- we forgot that there were ever monsters at all, even-- and we started saying the mountain was cursed. And so mostly people didn’t go to the mountain, except sometimes people did, and then they never came back, and that made it _extra_ cursed.

And anyway. The monsters were all alone under the ground for a long time, and they told stories because you do that in the dark when you’re scared. And one of the stories they told was this:

Someday, an angel will fall into the mountain, and set us all free. And the mountain will be empty again, and monsters will live on the surface, where they should have been the whole time.

It was a nice story, and everybody liked it a lot. It made people feel better. They made a whole rune just to remind people of the story, and the King of all monsters used it as a symbol so that people would feel better. It was a dream that everyone shared together.

And then one day, a-- a human fell underground. Right there in the Ruins, where we fell, but a long time before us. And they became friends with a monster, and they had a new mom and a new family, and people thought maybe that person was the angel. So everybody was really happy. And then something bad happened and they died. And their new friend took their soul, so that he could go through the barrier and bring the human back to the surface to be buried. But the humans were still bad, and hurt the human’s friend, and killed him.

And then the story stopped making people feel better, because the angel died. And the rune started to mean something else, sometimes, about death being kind of free because at least you didn’t have to be under a mountain anymore. But that’s sad and I don’t like it.

...and anyway then you came, so I guess the story was real anyway, only different than people thought. The end.

* * *

You consider this.

(Beneath the skin of existence, a shattered thing hisses, _C̵҉̧ơ͢͡w̶̷̕a̵͠r̢̛͘͝d͏̡̛.̸̨̧̛͢_ )

Frisk hums nervously in their nest. _Um. Anyway, that’s what I think. I don’t know if it’s really **real** -real. But it’s a nice story, maybe._

You sing soothing green comfort to them reflexively, though most of your attention is on peeling apart the layers of Frisk’s story.

There is a very important point which you do not think Frisk has fully processed. This is to be expected. Frisk is mortal, and also a child. _You_ are neither of these things. So you circle this point restlessly, considering, unnerved.

If a human fell into the mountain _before_ Frisk, and was not possessed by one of your fellow angels, that human should not have survived the landing. 

_Frisk_ did not survive the landing.

Your presence in the vessel stirred it to life, forced its empty lungs to fill, its limp heart to beat. You wrote their flesh back into the intended whole. You _revived_ them, and held their vibrant soul close, shielded from the light of the hashmallim by your own divine fire, until that duty no longer applied to them.

But Frisk, the human child, was dead.

So either the first human to fall truly _was_ an angel, enrobed in flesh as you are, or they died on impact, and _something else_ restored them.

You know a great deal about the universe. You have the original Plan. You know what can and cannot repair mortal damage. There is exactly one class of being which can act in the same manner as an angel in this regard.

It is the Fallen.

The Fallen do not reside on Earth. They reside in the Hall.

But you do not know where _the Hall_ resides.

And you fell _towards_ Earth.

_...are you sure you’re okay?_

You do not think that you are. But this is not a thing that you can tell Frisk. This you must keep-- you gather the thought, the extrapolations and predictions, and fold them into a colorless fractal, dense and interpenetrating. You shuffle it into your archives, near the search for your missing probabilities.

You do not like mysteries.

 **The Great Papyrus,** you say, briskly, unfolding the vessel’s limbs and turning your back on the locked door, the distant Creator’s song, the unknown and unknowable. **Locate.**

You _will_ find answers.

As your vessel’s eyes adjust to the light, you find that Sans is standing in the entrance of the tunnel, silhouetted by the dim under-mountain light, only his faint white eye lights disturbing the shadow of his figure. You did not feel his translocation, consumed as you were by the so-near and yet infinitely far-off song, but you find that you are not surprised to see him here.

“hey kiddo,” he says mildly, “thought we oughta have a chat.”


	15. idealism sits in prison

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _traitor_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reasons this chapter was delayed: I finally got that new Spider-Man game and it’s Very Good, dialogue-heavy chapters are hard to make interesting, I have the flu and it turns out that makes writing kind of An Ordeal, I had to spend some time rejiggering my chapter plans and major plot points for better flow, I got distracted writing later scenes and figuring out where exactly to slot them in, I got _very_ distracted illustrating a very spoilery scene from later in the fic that I can’t show you yet because it’s very spoilery. :|

You give very serious thought, when you approach the head of the cave and Sans fails to move, to translocating past him and avoiding this entire situation and probable encounter. It worked with the paired dogs, previously, and it seems unlikely that Sans would pursue you given his behaviour thus far. Even his song, all melancholy minor key, is faint and self-contained, difficult to pin down from any meaningful distance. He does not _connect_.

He has been translocating away from _you_. You think it is very fair if you translocate away from _him_.

But your covenant has been refined. Sans is a lilit, even if he is a _thief_ , and you are now bound to help and protect him. You understand your obligations, even if you are not entirely certain how to apply them.

 **Obedience,** you tell Frisk, dryly. They shine encouraging red at you, though you can feel their usual anxiety about the skeleton’s presence worrying at the edges of their soul.

Frisk said that people could be puzzles. Perhaps a chat can also be a puzzle.

This prospect does not fill you with confidence. Sans makes very bad puzzles.

“Speak thus,” you say, resigned.

“... ok. let’s start with that,” Sans says, “this language we’re speaking right now, is this, or is this _not_ , your native language?”

You consider. This is an intriguing question. You did not expect the corpse thief to have _interesting thoughts_. “Babel tongue. Foreign to all. First mortal tongue forgotten. Irrelevant. Counterpoint: all Tongues of Babel known. Voice of Above: song. First word: light.”

“oh boy,” says Sans, scraping his phalanges down the front of his skull, studying the ceiling. This is ridiculous. There is nothing on the ceiling to examine. “this is gonna be a thing.”

“Vague,” you complain mildly. His eye lights flick down at you.

“they think _i’m_ vague,” he mutters under his breath, “fine. let’s try _extremely blunt_. either you’re _really bad_ at communicating, or whatever you’re trying to say is _incomprehensible_.”

Frisk thrums a little indignantly. _Words are hard! He’s just a jerk! You’re doing great!_

“Frisk reports: words are hard, Sans is a jerk, doing great,” you repeat, dutifully.

“uh-huh,” he says blandly, “who’s frisk, is that you? do you understand how personal pronouns work?”

“Not Frisk. Frisk: human child, red soul,” you explain, and gesture at your vessel’s face demonstratively. The eye lights in San’s sockets very abruptly go out and do not reignite. You pause uncertainly, searching the hollows of his skull for signs of awareness. “Vessel.”

“oh good,” he says dimly, still empty-eyed, “we’re getting somewhere. is that-- uh-- _jeez_ \-- how many, uh, human children are we talking about here.”

You blink at him, considering. “Primary: Frisk. Red soul. Host of vessel. Secondary: self. Ophan. Possession of vessel. Tertiary: fractured. Unhuman. Decohered from vessel.”

He stares at you-- or possibly does not; you are not certain if his vision works without the lights, and lilim are so varied that it is difficult to make estimates-- for a long moment. “great. ok. so there _are_ three of them. uh, three of you.”

“False,” you say quickly, baffled that there has been this much miscommunication, “Singular human child. Only primary. Secondary: ophan. Tertiary: unhuman.”

He hooks his phalanges in an eye socket as his eye light flicker back to life. You can faintly hear him tapping out some rhythm on the inside of his own skull. “right. sure. so the kid is… frisk. and you’re… ophan?”

“False,” you interject, staring with interest at the crook of his phalanges tensing against the chalk-pale curve of his cheekbone. This seems potentially self-destructive. Is this your responsibility? “Choir: ophanim. Name… loud. Fathomless divine fracture open fill overspill flood forbidden. Small tongue approximation quiet contain ripple near-name: Sahaquiel.”

“...kind of a mouthful,” Sans says.

“Most Tongues of Babel in mouths,” you say.

“... yep.”

 _That’s not what he meant_ , Frisk offers.

He seems uncertain. You consider. “Some Tongues of Babel in hands.”

He flinches, phalanges scraping inside his skull. This is _probably_ your responsibility. You reach out quickly-- with both hands, in case your coordination is not adequate to the task-- to take his wrist and pull his hand away from his skull. He flinches _again_ , but he doesn’t resist. You almost release him again instantly as his song _floods_ your senses-- a humming sorrowful adagio, motif looping into itself in infinite swirls, eerily like an angel’s song, something he must have stolen with the eye-- but you reinforce your matrix with Frisk’s red determination and resist the impulse. He is somewhat more dense than you expect, given that he is composed entirely of bone, and you are forced to devote most of the vessel’s weight to this task, but you successfully extract his phalanges from his eye socket, so you are _satisfied_. 

“Stop,” you tell him sternly, peering over your hands. You are hanging from his wrist at a slight angle, balanced precariously on the vessel’s heels. His eye sockets narrow and he pulls his wrist free of the vessel’s fingers, very slowly, allowing you to regain normal balance by increments. You relinquish his bones reluctantly, unsettled by the way his song fades immediately into an almost-silent background hum. You will do it again if he does not stop. He cannot fool you.

“... sure,” he says, shoving his hands in his jacket, shoulders hunched a little defensively. Success! You are excellent at protecting lilim. “ok. let’s… there’s a lot to, uh, unpack here, so we’re gonna prioritize: murder, how are you feeling about that? uh, any and all of you.”

**?**

_He wants to know if we’re going to hurt people,_ Frisk tells you, slightly subdued.

“Covenant,” you tell him, “Of Frisk. Null harm monsters.”

“uh-huh. great job you’ve been doing with that.”

You consider the archival evidence of your own anger, and its consequences. You cannot precisely dispute this point with the victim of your violence, even if its consequences were temporary from a linear perspective. _Your_ perspective is not truly linear, no matter how limited you are by the vessel or how many filters you apply to your perception, and you would be very surprised if his perspective is linear, given that it contains his stolen eye.

“Error,” you acknowledge, “Penitence. Yet! Thus also!”

You gesture pointedly at his obscured hands. “Protect lilim! Null harm!”

He studies you. You do not enjoy this. Even with his stolen eye hidden, his attention is disconcertingly incisive.

“...the Great Papyrus? Null harm?” you offer uneasily. You are not accustomed to arguing in your own favour. You are not accustomed to _arguing_. This is uncomfortable and you want it to stop.

“right,” he says, finally, “you know what? doesn’t matter. we both know i can’t stop you. so. whatever you’re _looking for_? we can try that. without murder.”

You nod immediately. Good. You solved the puzzle? You think you solved the puzzle. Sans’ puzzles are much more confusing and upsetting than the Great Papyrus’ puzzles.

It occurs to you that perhaps this makes them _more effective_ puzzles, if the intention of a puzzle is not to be solved but to be distracting. This is not a thought that you enjoy.

“alright. great. next order of business: the human-- the, uh, red soul-- is frisk? and i’m _not_ talking to frisk right now.”

“Sahaquiel,” you remind him.

“... yep. and you’re… yeah, i don’t know what you are. the, uh, thing with all the eyes. can i assume that’s you?”

“Yes? Ophan.”

“that word doesn’t mean literally anything to me.”

 _Tell him you’re the angel!_ Frisk chimes in quickly, vibrating with nervous excitement.

“Angel,” you say obediently, “Ten choirs. Ophanim ninth.”

His eye lights disappear again.

This is a worrying trend.

“angel,” he says blankly.

“Yes?”

“prophecy, delta rune, free-the-underground… that angel.”

You consider. “Uncertainty.”

“which part?”

“All.”

“is there _another_ angel you might be?” he asks, his voice going tight and pitchy.

You stare at him uncertainly. Technically, _you_ are the only angel you might be. You were intentionally designed. The process did not include _potential variance_. In an infinite universe there are, of course, other strands of existence where you might be a variant more suited to that strand, but that angel would not be _you_. And not even you can see clearly enough to differentiate those potential strands. That is an ineffable subject beyond your purview.

 _I think he means if there was another story about an angel and you were in that story but not this one about the Underground,_ Frisk says, which does not clarify matters much.

“No?” you offer, cautiously. You do not think that there have been stories about you among mortals. You do not think that stories of ophanim are common in general. Your choir does not deal much with the material, and that is the subject of most stories, as far as you can tell.

He is silent for a suspiciously long moment. Without the lights in his eye sockets, it is difficult to be certain that he is conscious. But he is not dust, so he is alive. So you are still succeeding?

Finally, he inhales very deliberately, his eye lights flickering back in. “right. okay. you’re the angel. that makes as much sense as anything does, i guess.”

You always strive to be correct.

And you have solved _another_ puzzle. You are very good at this.

“and the other one? uh, tertiary? who’s that?”

 _Chara,_ whispers Frisk, _The one you replaced. Their name was Chara._

This seems familiar. You sort through your archives quickly to find the relevant memories. Oh, the flower. It also said this name. You suppose it is not surprising that two fractured things would see each other.

“Frisk reports: Chara,” you explain, glancing down at your shadow where the splinters of soul still cling, too fragile to manifest, silenced by Frisk’s resonance. But even broken souls, unable to find the shining hashmallim and their way home, seek light. It must have sought the warm glow of Frisk’s soul before, but you are the brightest thing here now. “Unhuman remnant. Decohered from vessel.”

Sans follows your gaze with his eye lights, but he does not look with the only eye that matters, so you doubt he sees anything of consequence.

“decoherence,” he says, “as in, _lost information._ ”

“Yes!” you confirm, pleased that finally communication appears to be working, despite its inherent inefficiencies, “Weak entanglement, wave collapse. Human linear prior. Isolation pain. Possibility restoration uncertain. Thus: retain.”

His eye lights flick back to you, searching the vessel’s face, with narrow sockets. “you’re somehow holding on to _decoherent_ quantum information-- by which i’m pretty sure you mean a human soul, or whatever’s left over after it dissipates, and i have no idea where you just find one of those lying around-- on the off-chance you can _recohere_ it?”

You consider. “Recoherence with system undesired outcome. Alternate solutions sought. Acceptable alternative: translation to desired environment. Vault of Heaven.”

He makes _a face_ entirely with his eye sockets and a slight downward tick of his smile. You have no idea what it means. “vault of heaven,” he mutters to himself, “of course.”

Oh. Of course, he will never see the Vault of Heaven. Their paper-thin souls do not return to Above when they die-- they simply evaporate into nothing, as insubstantial as shadows, condemned by their ancient mother to half-lives away from the beneficent regard of the infinite Creator. You have it on reasonably good authority-- seraphim, mostly-- that lilim find their condition vexatious. That is fair. It is very dreadful to be cut off from the Presence, as you now intimately know. Lilim cannot even warm themselves around the smaller presence of a human soul, handcrafted by Above and thus radiant with the fingerprints of the divine. Truly, theirs is a wretched condition.

Perhaps it was tactless to mention your hope of returning the sundered human home. After all, even this shattered soul is of greater esteem than a hundred monster souls, or a thousand angels. This disparity does not trouble you, but it troubled… others, once.

“Covenant of Frisk: help monsters,” you offer, as some consolation, “Remnant priority low.”

He considers you. This is slightly disconcerting.

“ _help monsters_ ,” he says, with skepticism so thick that even you detect it, “and what exactly does that look like. what’re you trying to _accomplish_ here, exactly.”

That-- is a very good question.

**?**

_Um,_ Frisk mumbles, nervous yellows sparking in their nest. _Well, so, there’s a couple of things we have to do. And I don’t know what exactly all of it looks like yet. But, um, you remember Flowey?_

You do.

_Okay, well, you know how I can make time kind of… go back a little bit? He could do that too, but before me. And when I came here, he couldn’t do it anymore. So first we have to make it so he can’t do that anymore when I leave, or else that’ll just be a mess._

Oh, that is easy. You will unmake him. An unmade thing can do nothing. The flower is already on the cusp of annihilation. You will barely even have to work at it.

_No! No, we can’t do that, because-- just because it’s not fair, okay? It’s not his fault he’s mean, he’s… it’s complicated. But remember? We talked about being nice and not hurting people who are smaller than us? Like that. He counts, too._

You suppose this is an abstract puzzle. A solution will be found.

_Right. Right, so when that’s done, then we have to… um, we have to… so you know how I said the angel will set all the monsters free? And get rid of that barrier, because it was a bad thing we shouldn’t have made?_

**Affirmation.**

_Okay. Okay. So, the thing is… the way to break the barrier is, a whole bunch of human souls--seven, actually-- have to kind of… work together, to open it. And there are already six souls here! They, um, they fell down a long time ago. So there’s… there’s only one missing! And that’s. That’s me! So--_ Their nest floods with blue. You hum urgent comfort, baffled.

“uh,” Sans says, eyeing you with narrow sockets, “you gonna--”

You hiss at him between the vessel’s teeth. You do not have time for him right now; you _certainly_ do not have the energy to summon up words for him. The eye lights in his sockets flicker and he tenses, but does not retreat. Fine. You will deal with him later.

Frisk’s soul rallies, pressing their sorrow into a tiny huddle at the base of their nest, brilliant with determination. You continue to hum soothingly, just in case, wicking away your own alarm as it materializes to prevent it from influencing your song.

_So we have to go to the barrier. And talk to Asgore. You have to let him have my-- me, my soul. And then he’ll-- he’ll do the rest! The barrier will go away, and all the monsters will be free! And that’s, that’ll-- that’s what I want!_

You do not want this.

_And it won’t even-- it won’t even really be like dying, because you can keep my body! So you’ll be safe, too! It’ll be… it’s the best thing we can do. Okay?_

**Unacceptable** , you say blankly.

Frisk vibrates with frustration, misery and determination in conflict beneath the rapid pulse of their soul, blue and red sliding off each other like oil and water. _It’s the only way. I-- look, I’ve done this a lot. I’ve done this a lot of times. I even got out once, before things got really bad, I k-- I killed Asgore, only him, and I took **his** soul and I went back and it was… it wasn’t worth it, nothing was worth doing it, just hurting that **one person** was too much, even if he was trying to hurt me, so I came back._

Time compressing, and then unfolding, blooming petal by petal, moments unspooling back into existence. Taking back your violence. Restoring life where you ended it.

 _But I just made it **worse**. Chara woke up again and they were, they were mad at me, because I didn’t-- because I couldn’t-- and then it was worse. It was **so much worse** , and nothing I did could make it better. I could go back, sometimes I went back again and again and again, but I couldn’t ever get-- it was like you, I wasn’t alone and Chara was stronger than me, sharper than me, and it just… I could do time, I could slow us down, I could m-make us kill Papyrus a h-hundred times--_

Skill, you think. For a human, traditionally unaware of their soul, Frisk has a great deal of skill.

_\--and he j-just said he believed in me and I **t-tried** , I swear I did, but I couldn’t keep my b-body. Not long enough to matter, not long enough to do it right and make it stop and in they end they just, they **always win**. Even when Sans-- did you know he bleeds? P-Papyrus doesn’t. I don’t know why._

You do not want to solve this.

_But I made us go back. It’s easier when they’re frustrated, and Sans is so **g-great** at being frustrating, even when he doesn’t win. That’s, that’s the farthest they ever get, because they get so irritated and then I can make us go back again and again, and he thinks I’m e-evil, but that’s okay, because Chara gets s-so **mad** when he does kill us and then I can send us **all the way back** , and that’s, that’s the best I can do, I can’t go back any farther, I can’t decide not to fall. I can’t decide that anymore. That’s the, **that’s** the thing I can’t undo, because I was selfish. I was stupid and selfish and now I just hurt people. I’m not special, or smart, or strong. I’m a mistake, and I made a mistake, and I don’t know how to… But I can fix it, I can **fix it** this time because **you’re here**. You have to help me. You have to. You have to._

You feel like you are falling.

(This is the worst part: you _do_ have to.)

“wh-- hey,” says Sans, and oh. You did fall. You blink up at the dark ceiling of the cavern. You were right, before. There is nothing interesting there.

Sans’ skull appears leaning over you, a crease between his eye sockets. “jeez, what was that about? you okay?”

You are not okay.

 _You have to,_ whispers Frisk miserably.

Covenant, you think, miserable.

 **Not yet,** you say.

They sink into their nest, dull red and blue still competing for prominence.

“Flower,” you tell Sans dully. His expression darkens instantly. “Flower holds time.”

“i’m familiar,” he drawls, “not a fan.”

“Seek flower.”

“... hm.”

You close the vessel's eyes. This does nothing to improve matters, but at least you do not have to look at Sans’ distrust.

“Halt flower command time. Null harm method. Then--”

Then you obey.

“Barrier,” you conclude, crawling to your feet and opening your eyes reluctantly.

Sans watches you thinly. Unlike the Great Papyrus, who is an improvement on him in literally every way, he does not offer you his hands and pull you upright.

Dimly, you think you want the Great Papyrus.

You also want to open a passage to the void and hide there, holding Frisk’s soul safe, until eternity ends.

What you want is not relevant.

You examine the floor. You wonder what kind of crystal this is.

“ok,” says Sans, “gonna need to do some research on that.”

He extracts one skeletal hand from his jacket and holds it out to you. You stare down at it. You are already standing.

“shortcut,” he says, prompting, and waggles his phalanges.

You blink.

He sighs, and wraps his phalanges around your wrist. His song filters back into your awareness, slow and sad and strange.

“you’re kind of slow on the uptake for an angel,” he says.

And then-- without opening his stolen eye-- he reaches, effortlessly, through the weave of the world and drags you along behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GOT THAT NAME IN THERE FINALLY ONLY TOOK FIFTEEN CHAPTERS. \o/ Also you may have noticed that the number of predicted chapters has changed. Do not be alarmed. Everything is proceeding according to plan.


	16. something so lonesome about you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _smells like bones_

Sans’ translocation is both _exactly like_ yours, and completely unfamiliar. The process _feels_ identical-- an openness where before there was a closed way, pulling, _stretching_ , and that flickering heartbeat moment of _emptiness_ , of finally being able to stretch out all your wings into _nothing_ , the welcome chill of non-space before you slide back into narrow reality-- but as far as you can tell he goes through none of the _steps_ of the process. He does not open his stolen eye to properly see his path, calculate a trajectory, tell his atoms to stop being _here_ and start being _there_. He just-- reaches out.

And then you are somewhere else.

You immediately stumble, dislocated by the experience of moving without your own will. Before you can collapse again to the floor, Sans' phalanges tighten around your wrist and you are pulled back, not gently. You blink down at the floor you have, surprisingly, not fallen onto.

A different, unfamiliar floor. It is decorated with surprisingly consistent waves of purple and blue fibers.

“mi casa, et cetera,” Sans says, releasing you and immediately wandering away.

You didn’t know he knew other Tongues of Babel.

 _Oh. We’re inside Sans’ and Papyrus’ house,_ says Frisk quietly. _I only saw it once._

You study the floor.

 _Are you mad at me?_ they ask.

You find the regularity of these patterns satisfactory.

_I-- it’s just… really important. Sometimes, you… you have to do something, even when you don’t want to. When it’s the right thing._

The colours of this floor are very similar to the colors on the vessel’s sweater. You pick at the hem, comparing the stripes and waves, the slight gradations between the colour variants.

_I’m sorry._

Frisk is your authority.

You hum, disconnected, **Obedience**.

Something clatters nearby. You look up, startled, and glance around the room (the interior of the house you knocked on, evidently) to find that Sans has gone farther than you realized-- there is a secondary room attached to this one, and he is in that room now. You follow him. The floor is different there-- red and brown squares of tile, _also_ reassuringly regular in their placement-- and large appliances that remind you of the room where Toriel makes pies.

Sans flings open the appliance that keeps things cold-- _fridge_ , supplies Frisk, distantly-- and stares into it for a moment, his phalanx tapping a constant rhythm out against the handle of the door.

“really, pap,” he mutters, slamming it closed again. When he turns and finds you looking at him, he freezes. You blink at him, bemused.

“uh,” he says, which is not very enlightening.

You consider.

“The Great Papyrus? Where?” you ask, as you still have not resolved _that_ puzzle, and at this rate your backlog is becoming unconscionable.

Sans’ eye sockets narrow, but something unusual happens to his smile. It-- _twitches_ , slightly, upwards but returns almost immediately to what you suppose is the resting state of his skull. You have no idea whatsoever about how to interpret this. Bones are not designed to operate this way. His entire face is wrong.

“maybe later,” he says, which is not actually an answer. You suppose this is not surprising. Sans is not very good at puzzles.

Before you can tell him this, he translocates-- you blink at the empty space that contained him, then return to the room with the wave floor. There is a tapping sound here now! It is the same rhythm that Sans was picking out on the door of the fridge. You look up, tracking it-- oh, there are stairs on the other side of this room-- to find him leaning on the banister that separates the floors of the house, tapping pointedly on the wood. He gestures at a door behind himself with a thumb.

There are flames beneath the door. You note, with interest, that the floor is not alight with them. Nor do they seem, particularly, to produce any heat. None that you can feel from this distance, nor that Sans seems to notice.

“research,” he says, “books. don’t leave the house.”

And then he translocates again. This time, you think, beyond the closed door. You pause-- if the fire is dangerous, this is your responsibility-- but you do not hear any indication of distress. Not once does he open the stolen eye, or appear to consider his actions at all. He seems to find translocation very natural. Something about this is not right.

You listen for a moment, but there is no return of the tapping. And also now you are alone in this room. You examine it, in lieu of anything else to hold your attention.

This is very different from Toriel’s house.

There is no hearth for magic fire to fill, or a bookshelf full of information, or a chair that Toriel sits in when she reads things. There _is_ a squashed greenish chair of some kind, set in front of a mysterious black box, but it is too large even for Toriel, and much too large for either of the skeletons. You touch the green chair with one hand, curiously.

It makes a jangling noise. You stop touching it immediately, and the jangling noise falls away. Was that a song? It did not sound like a song. It had no patterns that you could discern. But sometimes that is true, when things are very old or very broken. You suppose that the green chair does not look like it is in particularly good health.

You touch it again. There is another, different jangling noise. You hum, uncertainly, but there is no response.

 _It’s just a couch,_ says Frisk, faintly apologetic, slightly dim with the ache of your… dissatisfaction, _Like a chair but for two people. I think they keep spare change in it._

In it?

 _Yeah, like… under the cushions? You can take those off,_ Frisk explains.

You take those off. Well. You take one of those off. It is more difficult and unwieldy than you expected. You wobble slightly under the unbalanced weight of the cushion before finally dropping it on the floor. You stand on top of it (victoriously) and look inside the couch.

There is a collection of yellow-gold coins scattered on the interior of the couch. You kneel down on top of the couch cushion to be closer to it, and touch one, carefully, with one hand. It does not make a sound.

 _They kind of rattle, I think,_ says Frisk. _So one doesn’t make noise, but all of them does. If you kind of shake the couch maybe?_

You touch the edge of the couch and push slightly. The coins all shiver slightly in their heap, their edges rattling against one another to produce the jangling noise. You nod, satisfied. Puzzle solved.

You try to put the cushion back, but it doesn’t fit. So you put it back _almost_ right, and then crawl up onto the cushions on the couch-- jangle, jangle-- and press all the corners into position with your hands. You do not want to break one of the Great Papyrus’ puzzles. That would be terrible.

When you are satisfied that the cushion is appropriately replaced, you pick your way carefully down from the couch-- it is a slightly longer drop than you realized, and you stumble to your knees, but that is fine. You are becoming familiar with standing up when you fall.

Now. The couch puzzle suggests that there might be more puzzles. This is not very surprising, since the Great Papyrus lives here. You will find them all, and that will be satisfying until Sans stops doing whatever Sans is doing and you can be useful again.

Next, perhaps you will investigate the mysterious black box. It is closest, so this is efficient.

The black box sits on a wooden table with a drawer. You open the drawer. There are books? No. You pick one up. It is rectangular, and colorful, and weighs less than the books you are familiar with.

 _It’s a movie,_ Frisk says, indulgent, _Like, uh, kind of like a record, I guess. But flat? You aren’t in it, you just watch it._

 **Information transfer?** you clarify, as that is the purpose of books.

_Mm, sometimes. Sometimes they’re just for fun._

Fun.

_Things that you like, but that you don’t need to do. You know? Like the pie, or puzzles--_

You _do_ need to do puzzles. That is you.

_Well. But not, um, you don’t have to do them to… like for a job, or because somebody told you to. You just like them._

**Query?** That makes no sense. You want to solve puzzles. Also, that is you. Also, that is what you were made for. All of these things are true.

 _... oh,_ says Frisk, softly, the rising tone of discovery, of realization. You query them, curiously, but receive no response.

You put the movie back in the drawer and close it. This does not seem to be making progress on the mysterious black box.

The black box is roughly rectangular, thin, with creased edges and (!) a cord that leads into a wall. So it is an electronic device, like the microwave! But it does not open, so it is not for heating things, probably. You suppose it might generate ambient heat.

 _Do you want to know what it is?_ asks Frisk, cautiously.

Do you? … no, you want to solve the puzzle.

 _Okay,_ Frisk says, warm and pink with amusement. 

You do not see what is amusing, but you are pleased that they are pleased. You do not find it satisfying when they are unhappy. ~~You must make the most of your time.~~

_Wait, what was--_

You examine the box more closely, and find tiny tiles on one edge. Traditional.

_I thought that was broken…_

**?**

_Your, your purity thing, you’re doing it again, I thought--_

**Editing initialized,** you explain, checking briefly around the box for instructions. Nothing.

_But why?_

**Null person** , you tell them, and press a tile.

The slightly depressed center of the black box lights up, suddenly, with stripes of color. A single, high tone emits from it. You flinch away from it, startled.

 _What?_ Frisk asks, dull with something you recognize, vaguely, as horror.

 **Null person,** you repeat, watching the lit box for any indication that it is dangerous, **Instrument. Obedience.**

_No, that’s, that’s not--_

**Have to,** you recite, stepping forward when nothing happens and pressing the tile again.

The noise and colors stop.

So, for a moment, does Frisk.

_I didn’t… that’s not what I meant._

But it is what they said.

So it is what you will do. What you will be. Obedient. You are not-- have never been-- a person. You can pretend, if that is what Frisk wants-- you can be whatever is necessary, you are _uniquely positioned_ to be whatever is necessary, because of what you are ~~and what you have done~~. You can make it easy. You can be efficient, and useful, and subtle. You can find satisfaction. You can praise.

But you are not the hand that wields you. You are the ~~weapon~~ tool. You do not decide what you are, or what you do, or what you want. Someone else does that.

Frisk does that.

 _...I’m sorry,_ they say.

You hum a vague green comfort at them and turn to find another puzzle. This one is beyond your abilities.

You consider.

If Sans actually translocated into the room he indicated, then the _other_ room, hidden beyond a different closed door, does not contain Sans.

Which means it might contain the Great Papyrus.

 _That_ would be satisfactory.

Climbing the stairs is slightly more challenging that you expected, given your prior experience with stairs-- but, you suppose, you only went _down_ the stairs in Toriel’s house. Down is always easier than up. ~~That is why it is called falling~~.

The door is crisscrossed with words in the local Tongue of Babel. You examine them with interest. They are all in capital letters, so perhaps they were written by the Great Papyrus. This strengthens your theory. You find this satisfying.

NO BOYS ALLOWED.

NO GIRLS ALLOWED.

PAPYRUS ALLOWED.

Hm. You are not a Papyrus. So you are not _explicitly_ allowed. But you are not a boy or a girl-- you are an ophan-- so you are not explicitly _disallowed_. ~~This liminal space between permissions is familiar.~~ You undertake a risk-benefit analysis.

Risk: you are not allowed, and the Great Papyrus ejects you from the room. Likelihood: unknown.

Benefit: you find the Great Papyrus. Likelihood: plausible.

Acceptable. You open the door.

The Great Papyrus is not in the room. ~~This is disappointing~~. You search for puzzles in his absence.

The floor is still wavy here, but there is a different rectangle of fabric laid on top of it, covering most of the surface. It is dark purple, and there are flames picked out in fiber along the edges. You touch them carefully with one hand. They are not warm.

 _It’s not--_ Frisk starts, _It’s not that you don’t **count**. You do. You count. You matter, you **are** a person, you can be, I promise. But I-- I have to do this. And I can’t do it if you fight with me._

You never fight against your authority. ~~That has always been your flaw/lack of flaw.~~

There is a bookshelf here. This is not, strictly speaking, a puzzle. But it is information. You are more efficient when you have access to information, and you have been made repeatedly aware that some of your information is… inaccurate. You consider the books.

 _We talked about this,_ they say, plaintive, _I told you, remember, that sometimes you have to do the thing that’s better for everyone. Even if you don’t like it._

You will be obedient.

These books are about making puzzles! You touch them carefully, but do not remove them from the shelf. You discovered at Toriel’s house that books are more satisfying when someone else reads them. Maybe when you find the Great Papyrus, he will explain them to you. That would be satisfying.

_I don’t just-- I don’t want to make you--_

You examine the table nearby. There are many small figures on it. You squint at them, getting to the vessel’s knees so that you are closer to them and pressing your chin against the surface of the table. They are shaped like lilim, but you do not hear any songs.

_But it doesn’t matter what we want. This is for everyone. They all deserve to be free._

You hum, an approximation of your songs that crosses a little into the humming Toriel taught you for coaxing out snails and whimsums. The small figures do not react. You touch one very softly with a single finger. Nothing happens.

 _We’re responsible for them,_ Frisk says, _Because we’re dangerous. That’s what being dangerous really is. Responsibility. And I’m **going** to fix it. I’m going to set all the monsters free._

You stand up, and look down at the small figures. Fragile, and hollow, and useless without a hand to hold them.

You arrange them, neatly, into choirs.

You look down at what you have done. Spinning whorls of tiny figures, dancing around an empty place where they must imagine that something lives. Not a single one out of step. Not a single rebel among them.

The Great Papyrus is not here. There are no puzzles. You should leave.

When you open the door, you forget how close it is to the stairs.

There is something nostalgic about vertigo. The moment you realize, with perfect clarity, that you are going to fall. That you have made a mistake, and you cannot take it back. That nothing you say will matter. That there is no excuse.

You hit the stairs, halfway down, and something in the vessel snaps.

Then you hit the floor, and something snaps _worse_.

You feel Frisk reaching back, frantically, into time-- distant, much more distant than you realized, an unacceptable loss of linear progress-- and spool up the Plan immediately. You make no effort at all to find out what is actually wrong with the vessel this time-- you simply summon _wholeness_ and press it out, urgently, into reality. The vessel’s bones are wrenched abruptly into the correct positions, breath punched into and out of the lungs to jumpstart the process again, the heart stuttering uneasily.

You blink up at the ceiling, dimly, and count the wooden beams while Frisk’s soul, alarmed beyond words, sings hysterical misery. But they release their hold on time. So. Puzzle solved.

You close your eyes and breathe.

“back on the floor, huh?”

You open the vessel’s eyes. Sans is looking down at you expressionlessly. The smile does not count as an expression. You consider.

“Feet,” you say carefully, “Are bad.”

Sans’ smile does… _something_. His eye lights flick to the side, to-- you realize, after a moment-- the stairs. He is carrying several books, and his phalanges tap against them restlessly.

“welp. can’t disagree with that. your whole floating thing,” he says, and circles one hand vaguely at your vessel even though he is clearly attempting to suggest the wheels of your own native shape, “definitely seems like an improvement.”

You squint at him. He raises one brow bone, and then squints at _you_.

“hey. uh. you have a vision problem?”

You do not really want to talk about this.

“No eyes,” you say.

“beg to differ,” he says, “a lot.”

You sigh extravagantly. You learned this by watching the Great Papyrus yell at Sans, and feel that it is relevant. Sans makes an expression you cannot parse, and then makes a _noise_ that you cannot parse. He is very vexing. You are feeling vexed.

“I,” you tell him, “Am feeling vexed.”

 _When I said you should talk about your feelings,_ Frisk interjects, subdued and shaky, _I was kind of talking about with me._

But they do not tell you to stop. ~~Liminal space.~~

“uh-huh,” says Sans. His voice is strangely compressed. His face is still doing _the thing._ “that why you’re on the floor?”

You decide that this is not totally inaccurate. You could stand up. That would be efficient. And if you are told to, you will. But you do not want to. You want to lie here and count the ceiling beams and breathe. You nod.

“welp,” says Sans, and flops down beside you without any further comment, cradling the books on his ribcage.

You turn your head to squint at the side of his skull. “ _You_ are vexing,” you explain.

“so i’ve been told,” he says, supremely unconcerned.

You have no response to this, so you ignore him. He seems content to be ignored.

At this distance, you can almost feel the hum of the stolen eye that lurks beneath his bones. The song that _almost_ mirrors yours.

You frame your words several times before you try to say them.

“Who was eye?”

Sans flinches, and one skeletal hand makes an aborted motion towards the left eye socket, arrested halfway and dropped back onto his ribcage with a thump. He sighs. It is much less theatrical.

“don’t have a good answer for ya,” he says, after a moment, eye lights flicking sideways to assess you, “something like you, i guess. yeah?”

“Choirmate,” you say dimly, staring at the ceiling. You wonder if you will ever be able to unwind enough of yourself to even look in the _direction_ of the Vault of Heaven again. “Ophan.”

“... yeah. guess so.”

“Where?” you ask. None of your choirmates-- none of the Host of Heaven-- should have been left behind on Earth. There is too much risk; Earth is beloved, it would never be endangered like this intentionally. The eshim knew the consequences of their work. How did this happen. _How did this happen._

“... i know how this is gonna sound,” he says, which does not seem promising, “but i don’t remember.”

You consider this.

Mortal memories are not like yours. You have archives, and to you time is one thing-- all things happen simultaneously forever, and you merely filter yourself in and out of them, become aware of them as necessary for your work, at the demands of Above or in accordance with the Plan. Mortals are not like this. Mortals experience single-dimensional time, and their minds do not retain perfect information.

But.

“Memory extended,” you say, as your matrix decoheres from Frisk slightly, pulling automatically at your archives as if Sans were another ophan, as if you could offer him your own memories as proof-- _look, here are all the times you remembered differently, here is all the evidence that you are like me_. But he is not like you. He does not have archives. He is not a choirmate. He is a lilit, with one stolen piece of a corpse.

“yeah,” he says, sounding tired, “unfortunately. but not everything.”

You feel… bad.

You press the heels of your hands over the vessels eyes, in an optimistic attempt to make them stop. You cannot tell if it is working with your eyes closed, but based on the weight in your throat and tightness of your ribcage, you suspect it is not.

 _It’ll be okay…_ Frisk says uncertainly.

“... sorry,” he whispers.

You do not want him to be sorry. You want to know how this happened. You want to know how one of your choirmates was lost here before you. What their name was. What their song sounded like. If they fell, or were lost, or ~~if something else happened, if they were _sent here, if this was even their fault, if this was even **your fault, what happened to the probabilities, and why here, and this moment, this mountain, this soul, these lilim, why--**_~~

You choke on a breath and what actually happens is a kind of whining, stuttery sob.

“aw, hey,” says Sans.

A slight weight presses against the top of your head, and scratches lightly across your scalp, points threading between your hair. You pull your hands away from your eye and blink tears out of them to stare sideways at the skeleton. 

His eye sockets are half-lidded, smile crimped down at the corners, and his eye lights are very small, tracking the tears on your face with palpable dismay. He pets your head again and you shudder through another sob, curl up sideways towards him, pulling your legs up to tuck them against the side of his ribcage. His song is stronger this way, so close to what you want, humming just beneath his bones, just out of reach. That seems safer. That seems like it might help.

He freezes for a moment, but before you can rally enough to try and assess the cause or solve the problem, he curls his arm up and continues petting your head.

“ok,” he says quietly, “ok.”

His phalanges tap a slow rhythm out on the top of the books he brought with him. You wonder if he knows how close that pattern is to his own song. If he can even hear it.

The crying stops faster this time. You aren’t sure if you should attribute this to the fact that you have done it several times now, or if the proximity of Sans and his almost-angel song is a contributing factor. You do not care.

You sit up. Sans startles, blinking up at you without moving while you scrub the remnant tears off of your face with the sleeves of the sweater. When you try to take a book off of his ribcage, though, he tightens his grip on them and stands up, holding out a hand to you in a familiar way. You take it, and he pulls you to your feet. He is not as good at it as the Great Papyrus, but he accomplishes the task adequately.

His eye lights flick up and down the vessel several times, searchingly. “you ok?”

You nod decisively and try to pull a book away from him again. He raises a brow bone and steps back before you can get a grip on it.

“pushy,” he comments, and walks to the couch. You follow him. He gives the cushion you removed slightly more attention, which is unsettling. You were reasonably certain you had replaced it in its designated position. But he just shrugs, and sits on the other cushion, nodding at the empty space. “c’mon. research time.”

You climb up onto the couch obediently. It jangles. You move very slowly to make it jangle less. When you look at Sans again, expectantly, he is giving you another uninterpretable look, his eye sockets slightly squinted and his smile ticked upwards.

“also,” he adds, fishing in the pocket of his jacket and producing something wrapped in paper, “lunch.”

He holds out the paper-wrapped thing until you take it. You stare at it, then at him. He gestures at it impatiently. You open the paper. Inside, there is a slightly squashed-- _hamburger_ , says Frisk, sounding amused, _He brought us a hamburger._

You look at Sans for direction. He is ignoring you, and reading a book. You put the paper on the arm of the couch and reach for one of the other books, but before you can even touch it the book has whipped away in-- you blink, startled-- a haze of blue, where it now hovers in the air, gently, out of reach. You glance at Sans. He has two phalanges pressed together, pointed upwards where the book levitates, limned slightly in electric blue. He has not looked away from the book _he_ is reading.

“first you eat, then you research,” he says blandly, flipping a page with his unoccupied hand, “order of operations. very important.”

You squint at the side of his skull. He does not look at you. You have the distinct impression that this is intentional, and that the intent is to _irritate you_. It is _successful_.

“ _You,_ ” you say, pointedly.

His smile, if anything, _grows_. “already ate. your turn.”

You look at the book. You look at the hamburger. You turn to Sans and sigh, again, to make your opinion of this exchange clear. His smile wobbles, but he does not relent. Fine.

You pick up the hamburger-- it is sticky, you do not like the way it feels-- and bite it.

You stop.

 _...well?_ asks Frisk, buzzing curiously. _I only had the fries, and he dumped ketchup all **over** them. Is it good?_

It is very different from the butterscotch cinnamon pie. It is not sweet and soft. You scour your archives quickly. Savoury. Soft-crunchy-chewy. Crispy. Acidic? Smokey? There are a lot of things happening in your mouth. It is all a lot.

“... you doing ok there?” asks Sans, watching you sideways.

You hesitate, but nod. You bite the hamburger again experimentally. It tastes the same, even if the same is a lot. You find this constancy reassuring. Vaguely, you register that some of this reassurance is probably coming _from the hamburger_ \-- when Toriel made pies, she put green into them to make them comforting, and this is a not-dissimilar feeling. This is fine. It is difficult, sometimes, to summon any green of your own-- gold and blue are your natural conditions, and you have more access to red and its variants through Frisk, but kindness is complicated and sometimes tricky to touch. And you seem to need green often, beneath the mountain.

You eat the hamburger. Sans is apparently satisfied with your adherence to this condition, because he reaches up to snag the book out of midair and put it back in the stack on the couch.

Your hands are sticky. You do not want to touch the books with sticky hands-- then the books will be sticky, and that will not be satisfactory.

“Mmmmmm,” you hum irritably, shaking your hands vaguely. 

Sans glances at you, then at your hands. His eye lights flick up to study your face for a moment. “no words for that problem, huh,” he says, but he doesn’t seem to expect a response so you ignore him.

After a moment, he sighs and puts his book to one side. He hops off the couch and, before you can register what exactly he is doing, lifts _you_ off the couch with one hand under each of your arms and sets you on your feet. You stare at him blankly, confused, while he puts his hands in his pockets and shuffles towards the room where pies are made.

“c’mon then, let’s get you clean hands,” he says over his shoulder.

Clean hands is _exactly_ what you want. You follow him.

His head is tilted back, considering the very tall structure next to the fridge. He huffs into the collar of his hoodie, and gestures for you to come closer, so you do. He leans down a little bit so that his eye sockets are directly even with your vessel’s eyes. You blink at him.

“k. we’re gonna do something a little scary, maybe. pap decided he needed a tall sink-- _for some reason_ \-- so ‘m gonna do a little,” he waggles his phalanges, where blue light flickers playfully, “magic to getcha up there. you can wash your hands at the tap. k?”

You look up. You do not know what a tap is, but if it will clean your hands, that is good. You do not think that this sounds very scary, especially if it was the decision of the Great Papyrus to make the-- sink?-- tall.

You look back at Sans and nod. He straightens, looking up at the sink, and snaps his phalanges.

You are dimly aware of something cool and vaguely familiar washing over your wheels.

You wait.

Nothing happens.

 _I’m not blue?_ Frisk asks, spinning slightly in place as if examining their soul from every angle, humming a little with confusion.

Sans looks down at you, a crease between his eye sockets, and snaps again. Nothing happens. He squints at you.

“huh,” he says, snapping a few more time in quick succession-- you feel that same cool sensation sweeping over you at various points, wheels and wings, once coming close enough to grade into your matrix slightly, “ok. i guess that’s not really a surprise.”

You present your still-sticky hands to him, dissatisfied. He make a noise that you think is the first half of a laugh, stifled by his teeth and by ducking his head into the collar of his jacket. Gold flickers faintly in your matrix. Toriel laughed sometimes. That! Is a good noise?

“welp,” he says, eyeing your hands where you are waving them just in front of his skull optimistically, “let’s try this, then.”

This time, when he snaps, the cool feeling settles on the vessel’s limbs, blue light sheathing your skin, and you feel gravity releasing its hold on you. You flail your limbs wildly-- usually this is the point where you fall-- until Sans gently wraps his free hand around your ankle and tugs you down slightly. He waves with the hand that is lit with blue, and you sway slightly in time with his motions.

“‘m not gonna drop ya,” he says, and gestures upwards.

You float up to the top of the sink as if your vessel had no more mass than a feather, gently buoyed by the air. There is a metal thing on the top of the sink. Oh. It is a _puzzle_. A hand-cleaning puzzle? The Great Papyrus is very clever.

 _Okay, um, I’m gonna help with this one,_ says Frisk, sounding slightly nervous, _Because I don’t know how long he can do this? And we already fell once today and we should… not do that again._

You hum acquiescence, studying the puzzle.

 _Okay,_ says Frisk, and then hesitates, _Um, so, this isn’t very complicated. I don’t want to… hm. Those bits, the round ones? Those can move._

You squint. You will have to touch _the puzzle_ while your hands are sticky. This does not seem satisfactory?

 _Well, it’s a lot easier to clean metal than books,_ Frisk suggests.

Reluctantly, you touch one of the metal pieces. It doesn’t click, but it does wobble slightly, so you push it more firmly. It spins! You are very familiar with spinning things. You spin your own wheels at the same angle and speed as you spin the metal piece.

Very quickly, the puzzle makes a sputtering sound, and water pours out of the curved piece.

 _You did it!_ Frisk says encouragingly. _Now you just wash our hands. Just put them under the water, okay?_

You comply, and water rushes over your fingers, although wherever it falls into the field of blue light it peels into tiny pearls of liquid and floats gently alongside you. It is fast and cold and not entirely satisfactory. But? Puzzle solved?

Before you can determine if you need to unspin the first piece or spin the second piece to make the water stop, you find that you are sinking gently back to the floor. Sans is leaning against a counter, and seems entirely unconcerned that there is a half-finished puzzle on top of the sink. He snaps, and the blue light around your vessel vanishes with a faint, tingly feeling as gravity becomes your problem again. Water collapses to the floor in a series of little puddles, but he doesn’t seem concerned about that either. He just raises a brow bone at you as you continue to hold your hands out in front of you, shaking them slightly to encourage the water to leave. It clings, persistently, to your skin.

He coughs, and when you look at him, he brushes his phalanges against the front of his jacket several times, slowly, watching you. You blink at him, then at your hands. Experimentally, you wipe them on your sweater.

Now your sweater is slightly damp, but your hands are dry! This is much more satisfactory.

“Mm! Yes!” you tell him, pleased.

“cool,” he says, around the edges of a more complete laugh, “research now?”

You head immediately to the couch and climb onto it so you can reach the books. Sans trails behind you, because he is _very slow_. This time he does not take the book away, so you open it-- it is a book about vector space-- and begin flicking through the pages quickly, parsing them into archive entries. Some of it is familiar, but it does no harm to have redundant entries for the moment. You can compare and collate them into holistic entries later.

It does not take long to collect the entries for this book, so you put it on the floor and reach for the next one. Sans is looking at you, eye sockets narrowed. You hesitate. Maybe you should not have put the book on the floor.

“what,” he says slowly, “exactly are you doing.”

“Research,” you say, holding up the next book demonstratively.

His eye lights flick to the book you put on the floor. “uh huh. you actually read any of that?”

You consider this. “Mmm. Image? Record. Review.”

He is tapping on the spine of a book again. “huh,” he says, distracted, staring into the middle of the room. You follow his gaze. There is nothing there. When you turn back, he is looking at you again. 

“we’d call that a photographic memory, pretty sure. it’s uh,” he flips the cover of the book open, closed, open, closed, “not supposed to be literally possible for people. eidetic, yeah, maybe. photographic? nah.”

He hesitates, tapping, his eye lights flicking randomly around the room, never settling long enough for you to really follow the course of his interest. “pap has one, though,” he mutters, more to himself than to you, “and… hhh. well, guess this’ll be a short study session, anyway.”

**?**

_I dunno,_ say Frisk, _Maybe he’s just nervous about Flowey._

You consider. The flower _is_ disconcerting. It would be much easier to just unmake the thing, but as this has been forbidden you will need to find another solution. You open the next book and scan through it for archival material. You have a suspicion, which you do not enjoy, that you will need to be very creative to solve _that_ puzzle. Particularly as you still do not know precisely how _Frisk_ interacts with time, and they have not provided you with any useful data, only able to confirm that they need to feel **determined** to SAVE, and that it is easiest to do when they have direct access to the sparks you have observed.

You wonder if you can witness the adjustment when it takes place, if you watch it with your eyes open.

 **SAVE here?** you ask, shuffling through your archives for any pre-existing data.

 _Huh? Um, maybe,_ they say, shifting nervously in the nest. _I mean, there isn’t a SAVE POINT here, but maybe. If I have to? Why?_

 **Observation,** you explain, spinning your wheels into a receptive alignment in demonstration. **Data.**

 _Oh. Um… okay, I guess. I can try? I mean, yes. I definitely can,_ they say, pulsing brighter red with each moment.

You pull your attention forward and reach out to touch the side of Sans’ skull to get his attention. He freezes, eye lights skipping sideways to look at you. “uh.”

“Eyes,” you say, covering the vessel’s eyes with your hands, “See time. This? Distress? Go away.”

When you remove your hands, he is staring at you, but has not moved. This is not useful. You have been considering prior interactions, and you are reasonably certain that he has indicated distress at the opening of his stolen eye several times. His eye will always respond to yours-- that is the way you are designed, to see and know each other. You do not understand why he stole it if he didn’t want to see, but he obviously doesn’t. You lean forward to push at his leg impatiently. “Go! Go!”

He makes a laughing sound again, but this time it does not sound as good. It sounds nervous and confused. “uh, ok, thanks for the heads-up, but uh. nah. not going anywhere.”

You blink at him, and carefully arrange your face into a frown. His eye sockets twitch. “Distress!” you emphasize, flapping your hands at his left eye socket, where the stolen eye materializes. “You! Distress! Go away!”

He grabs one of your hands to stop you from smacking him in the face-- oh, you are closer than you thought-- and smiles at you thinly. “nope. no thanks. last time i left you alone, you fell down a flight of stairs. don’t think i didn’t notice.”

You hesitate. He allows you remove your hand from his phalanges. “Mistake,” you say, blinking, “Feet are bad.”

He shrugs. “yep. still not going anywhere. do your angel thing.”

“Distress?” you confirm, covering your own left eye this time.

“i’ll get over it,” he says briskly, and waves a hand at you impatiently, turning back to flipping the pages of his book. His eye lights do not track across the pages at all. “go on, do whatever.”

You sigh at him. This has no effect. This is not a satisfactory conclusion. You suspect that this was a puzzle, and as usual when Sans makes a puzzle, you have not solved it, because he is _impossible_.

Fine. There is still data to collect.

You nudge Frisk gently, and fling open your dozen accessible eyes.

The world fills in with familiar golden thread, stretching out infinitely. The house peels back in onion-skin layers all the moments of its construction, of the life undertaken inside it-- small skeletons, you think, a tall smudge of something indistinct and distantly familiar, fading in and out of your processing-- of the slow entropy that afflicts all mortal things. The weave is not perfect, and that alone is alarming-- somewhere nearby there is a hollow space, and curled up at your feet there is the scattered hissing wreckage of the other human child, and not so far away, beneath the frost, another broken thing, a thing you must contend with and contain, is seething and plotting-- but you can identify the frayed places, the errors and snarls, and you will find a way to repair them. You are aware, abstractly, of Sans beside your vessel on the couch, tense and unhappy but resolved, the electric blue light of his ophan eye sparking to life and zeroing in, as usual, on each of your eyes in turn, seeking to foster a connection even though there is nothing on the other end that could see you in turn, that could hear your songs. You ache for the connection, for the lost story of this choirmate, but that is not why you are here.

You turn your eyes away, and focus on Frisk’s soul, a pulse of brilliant red waiting patiently for their cue. You open your wheels into reception and hum your song to them, steady bells, the metronome against which time is measured.

 _Okay,_ they say, resonant with determination, _Let’s--_

**S A V E**

You watch with interest as, for a moment, the _entire weave_ pauses and pulls inward, like fabric pinched from above, towards the single point that Frisk’s soul represents. In the center of that bright, red point, all the threads converge into a single moment, and leave an echo imprint behind of all their angles and orientations. Before the weave can settle again, you zero in on a single thread that moves slightly out of phase with the rest of its kind, and follow it. It spins out, snarled and strange, curling in odd places around irrelevant architecture-- it sweeps a long pulse around the main room, loops twice around Sans without touching him, lingers near the doorway in hesitant curves-- before vanishing beyond your sight, weaving unsteadily in the direction of the deeper mountain.

You detach an eye from your main body-- Frisk makes a noise of surprise that you ignore-- and send it forward, tracing the line, to gather data and return when it reaches a terminus. But before it can even venture beyond the snow, it sputters and cracks, light scattering out of it and evaporating into nothing, the husk disintegrating before it can manifest into reality, dead. You snap your eyes closed defensively, though there is no point, really-- no threat to defend against except your own ineffectiveness. You simply cannot send your eyes to any meaningful distance. Not, at least, while you are confined within the vessel.

You draw your attention back to the vessel as Frisk settles back into their nest, humming curiosity at you. Sans is scrubbing the heel of one hand against the outer edge of his left eye socket, shoulders hunched defensively, but his eye lights, tiny and flickering, are focused on you.

“Distress?” you ask him, frowning. He shrugs, and pulls his hand away, examining it briefly.

“anything interesting?” he asks nonchalantly, shoving his hands back in his pockets.

You hum, considering. “Time pull. Mm. World: this,” you pluck at the fabric of your sweater, pull it out so that you can make a taut single plane. “Whole. Yet! Thus also: threads. Pull, unravel, structural collapse. Fragile. Yet! Change. Break? New thread. Repair possible.”

You look up to check that Sans understands. He spins so that his spine is pressed against the arm of the couch and he can face you more fully, crossing his legs-- one of his slippers falls off, which he ignores-- and waves a hand for you to go on.

“Frisk reports: SAVE, determination,” you explain, and Frisk hums affirmation in your center, “Thus: world gather.” You pinch the front of your sweater and pull it away from your body, so that the plane you have created pulls and twists towards your fingers.

“Soul retain thread orientation. Probable LOAD, thus,” you release the fabric, and it flattens back into a plane, “Yet! Pull, twist, damage. Thread damage. Many times, many damage. Follow damage, find origin. Repair damage, possible null command of time. Threads thus: whole.”

You let go of your sweater and glance in the direction that the thread trailed off in. “Damage there,” you say, gesturing, “Yet far. Eyes fail. Too small. Skin, vessel, small.”

“huh,” says Sans, “i kind of just figured you were always this size.”

You glance at him, irrationally irritated. “Null,” you say shortly. “Not small. _Much_. Burn out planet. Break. Shatter. Planet important. Unacceptable. Thus: small.”

“... oh,” says Sans, faintly, “... uh. thanks, i think.”

You frown. It is increasingly easy to accomplish. “Null useful,” you say, gesturing at the door where the thread vanished, “Null thanks. Bad! Small is bad! Inefficient! More bad!”

“hey, hey,” he says, pulling his hands out of his pockets and making a vague gesture you cannot interpret, halfway to reaching towards you, “you’re not-- look. i’m not exactly a neutral observer here? i live here, i want it to not be, uh, burned out. more or less. but just from observation, you’re not useless? you’re, uh, kind of terrifying. but not useless.”

You sigh at him dramatically. “Mortal all small. All terror. Even small! Terror.”

He sighs, much less dramatically. “kind of missing my point. you’re doing fine. we’ll figure it out. k? i’ve uh, i’ve got a lot of practice with… what you might call lost causes. might actually have a chance with this one. so. that’s. yep.” He trails off, shoving his hands back in his pockets and shrugging, staring vaguely at the door.

You squint at him, then at the door. You consider what you know of the thread that you failed to track. The strange warping, the way it meanders searchingly instead of connecting to anything. Humming, you pick at the hem of your sweater with your fingernails, separating threads.

“Mmm. Thread damage,” you glance up at Sans, eyeing his left eye socket, “Eye where. Forgotten? Else? Forgotten else?”

He blinks at you, eye lights scattering wider with what you think is surprise. “uh. ok. let’s. yep, let’s see if this-- ok. huh. hang on, this is-- uh, this is tricky.”

You sit up on your knees and lean forward, balancing yourself on his shoulders. He stills, although he does not seem as alarmed as he has previously. He blinks at you while you peer into his eye socket, squinting. You note, with interest, that there is no visible husk of the eye within the socket-- it must manifest only when it is open. You glance around the room, tracing the phantom image of the thread with the vessel’s eyes.

“Thus,” you explain, tracing the trajectory with one hand so he can see, ending with the two loops around him, “Here. Damage. Forgotten else?”

You are not intended to be on Earth. It is not designed for you. You, alive, can contain yourself in flesh-- hide in the vessel, make yourself small and careful. But Sans’ eye is not connected to another angel. So it must have come from a corpse, harvested from something that could no longer control what it left behind. Something which was not contained in flesh, and thus would not be able to reduce its interference on reality. It would have _less_ interference-- it is not alive, would not be a constant moving contradiction that reality struggled with-- but it would still interfere. If he does not remember where it came from, perhaps _that_ is the effect that the dead ophan has.

 _Perhaps_ that is the source of the snarled thread.

 _Perhaps_ that is the source of the broken time.

Sans hisses through his teeth, one hand scraping against his skull. You intercept it before it can reach his eye socket. He doesn’t resist this. You don’t think he is entirely aware. “how-- ok. there’s a-- space. things i can’t-- yeah. where i learned things, how i got… here. hard to talk about. hard to _think_ about. _nobody_ thinks about it. like none of it ever happ--” he pauses, flinching, “like he-- he wasn’t-- like--”

You pet the top of his skull carefully. He blinks, tension relaxing out of his bones slightly. Good. “uh?”

“Enough,” you tell him, “Forgotten else. Find. Central forgotten? Place?”

He squints at his own hand, captured by yours. You allow him to take it back, and are satisfied when he just blinks at it for a moment and then puts it back in his jacket, eye light slipping sideways to avoid looking directly at you. “uh. something about the core… i don’t know. maybe.”

You blink, assessing your own structure. You have a core, but there is nothing there that Sans should remember, you do not think.

“Core?” you ask, picking your way off the couch. This time, when you stumble, Sans’ hand shoots out and grabs at your shoulder to stop you from falling.

“big machine. powers the underground. something’s wrong with it… i dunno. i can’t remember,” he says, wryly, slipping his bare foot back into the slipper that lies on the floor.

You pull on his jacket. “There. Translocate. Take.”

He raises a brow bone at you. “s’that what you call it. seen you doing it yourself. you don’t want to make your own jumps?”

You frown _and_ sigh at him. “Small.”

He shrugs, and takes your shoulder in one hand. “alright then. one shortcut, coming up.”

This time, you flick one eye open as he reaches, and you confirm it. He does not look where he is going. He just moves.

He just knows.


	17. i couldn't feel, so i tried to touch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _an ominous structure_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next couple of weeks are a madhouse for me, so expect this slow-down on updates to continue for a little bit.

Although your equilibrium is still thrown slightly off-center by Sans’ translocation, his phalanges clasping your shoulder prevent you from any more dramatic reaction than wobbling slightly in his grip as you re-emerge from his house (the crisp chill fraction of a moment in the void, between places) into this “core”.

It takes you a moment to place the tangy, metallic scent of the air as ozone; a moment longer to reason that, since you are not in the planet’s upper atmosphere and there are unlikely to be lightning strikes beneath the mountain, it is probably a byproduct of surging electricity. The ambient temperature of this place is an abrupt spike from the pleasant chill of Snowdin, or even the tolerable middling warmth of inside the skeleton monsters’ house-- an oppressive, dry heat that suppresses your vessel’s lungs slightly, not enough to cause _discomfort_ but enough that you are _aware_ of it.

The room is small, every surface tiled in a dull blue metal broken by coils of copper conduits running along the bottom edge of the walls. Dials and gauges displaying the three primary colors spin and tick steadily in neat rows along one wall. You can see circuity etched into the floor, traced in thin orderly lines in a slightly different metal, presumably one which is more conductive.

Other than a startled lilit which you tentatively identify as a whimsun and correspondingly dismiss as unlikely to initiate an encounter, there is nothing of interest.

“huh,” says Sans, glancing around the room, “coulda sworn-- hhh. he already started moving the rooms.”

“Core?” you check.

He makes a strange oscillating noise that you are not certain how to interpret, wobbling one hand in the air vaguely. “kinda. yeah? just not where i meant to land. thought i was aiming for further in. or, uh, a different room in the same place. it’s complicated.”

You blink, twisting your head as far as you can to one side so that you can peer sideways up at his skull. He is still smiling, but tensely, and his eye sockets are half-lidded. He sighs. “uh, we’re gonna want to walk the rest of the way.”

He shoves his hands into his pockets. You squint at him suspiciously. “Inefficient,” you point out.

He shrugs. “yep.”

You wait for him to provide any kind of explanation, but he just stares at you, blandly. You are reminded of why you find him vexing, entirely aside from his appropriation of another ophan’s eye. Before you can decide if you are going to express this to him again (and if so how, since it didn’t seem to make any impression last time) the lilit nearby make an irate buzzing noise. This is not a noise that you associate with whimsuns.

On closer assessment, this whimsun appears to be wearing a suit of armor, which is unlike the whimsuns that Toriel tried to introduce you to in the Ruins. (They cried and ran away. This did not surprise you. They are very small and you are very frightening. But you hummed obediently, because Toriel taught you how. Sometimes, one of them would hide in the fallen leaves to listen if you didn’t look directly at it. That was satisfying.) This whimsun does not look like it will cry and run away.

You are proven correct when you feel the now-familiar tug against Frisk’s soul, pulled into the encounter space even as, distantly, you hear Sans mutter invective under his breath.

_Whimsalot,_ Frisk says, _It finally stopped worrying._

~~You should ask it how.~~

_I wish you wouldn’t do that,_ Frisk sighs, vibrating irritably as they hover around the command to ACT. ~~But a wish is not a command. You do not have to obey.~~

Frisk indicates that you should PRAY. You do not know why this is considered an interaction for the purposes of the encounter, but it does not particularly matter. You are obedient. You skim through your archives for whatever posture of supplication is traditional among the Children of Eve.

Once you have found it, you sink down to the vessel’s knees, interlacing your fingers and folding them together. This creates a subtle asymmetry that you find abstractly interesting, but you set this aside for the moment and close the vessel’s eyes. In the interior darkness, illumined only by yourself, you consider.

Angels do not pray in the way humans do. You praise, and that is all. All that you require is provided to you-- your purpose, your work, the Presence-- and to petition for any of it to be otherwise would indicate a dissatisfaction with the Vault of Heaven which, you suspect, would simply lead to Falling. But you are not in the Vault of Heaven, and the only presence in you is Frisk.

You can pray to Frisk.

“Cast me not away from thy presence,” you say, and let whole truth, faith, _need_ fill the Word like water poured into a cup, spilling over the edges, a demand and a plea, “And take not thy holy spirit from me.”

_I have to,_ Frisk says, _I’m sorry._

Yes. That is what makes it a prayer.

You open the vessel’s eyes and wait for the whimsalot to take its turn in the encounter. It hums thoughtfully, murmuring “There’s still hope…” as a ring of attacks hovers passively around Frisk and the shell of your wheels. ~~You measure this assessment of the situation with interest, as~~ Frisk skims through the attacks before you can even make an attempt to discourage this wild behaviour. But as before, they are quick and precise in their actions, and as the magic of the green butterfly breaks against your wheels you feel no damage to your structure. You feel vaguely energized, in fact.

**Kindness,** you comment, **Hope.**

But Frisk just sighs noncommittally and pulls your attention to the need to SPARE this lilit. You obey, and watch the world fade back into your vessel’s vision.

You are unprepared for the whimsalot to dart close to you, wings a mild fluttering hum, and press its hand-- no larger than a fingernail on the vessel’s hand-- against your sternum, where the soul retreats when an encounter ends, where you live, with all your edges tucked into the flesh. Behind you, Sans shifts-- in the dark encounter space, you had momentarily forgotten that he was with you-- but he does not intervene. You blink down at the lilit, bemused. If it is going to attack the vessel now, that is pointless. You can simply repair it.

“Don’t give up!” it says, its voice clearer here, slightly echoing inside the helmet, a thin musical sound that you immediately mimic within your rings, slightly, in a cascade of delicate bells. Even Frisk, sullen and frustrated, resonates with the sound in a slight tone of peach amusement.

~~You will remember this advice.~~ This mysterious injunction delivered, it nods decisively to itself and flits from the room. You watch it go, unlacing your fingers to tap curiously at the place where it put its hand.

**Lilim strange,** you inform Frisk.

_Made of love,_ Frisk says dryly. _Or so they say._

Sans is watching you closely as you carefully pick yourself back up to a standing posture. “welp. congrats on your latest non-murder.”

You consider frowning at him, but it does not seem to adequately display your dissatisfaction to him, so you discard the idea. “Null harm monsters,” you remind him, but he just shrugs.

“so. frisk. how’s that work?” he asks over his shoulder, shuffling through the same door that the whimsalot left through. You follow him. There is a hallway outside of the room, structured much the same as the room itself was-- metal, and circuits, and the smell of distant electricity.

You blink at the back of his skull, bemused. “Red soul.”

“sure. but how did this all, uh, how did you…” he trails off, apparently losing track of the words he wants and settling for vague hand gestures which tell you nothing particularly useful. “humans don’t usually walk around with angels?”

He does not sound entirely certain of this, which is peculiar, given that he is correct. “Null. Angels very loud, very much. Souls small, important. Vessel cede control to angel-- loudest, control. Yet thus: human soul important. Alone? Choose? Choose. Soul must choose. If loud angel, limit choice. Thus: request only. Soul request: way open.”

“...ok. so you’re the, uh, loudest person in the human’s body, so you’re driving. and frisk… invited you?”

“Mistake, help,” you recall, “Request intercepted. Falling.”

“can they, uh, uninvite you?”

You stop following him, your vessel stalled in the middle of the hallway, as something like ~~horror~~ alarm fills your matrices with a wash of electric neon colors, orange and red and yellow scattering into each other. Frisk _absolutely should not_ , as you have no other refuge to hide in. Constrained this way, cut off from the Vault of Heaven and divine certainty, you can no longer hear the prayers of distant mortals, could not seek another vessel if you wanted one. ~~You do not want one.~~

_I won’t,_ Frisk assures you, sweeping fractured colors smooth with warm, red resolution. _You don’t have to go anywhere. I won’t._

~~That is what makes it a prayer.~~

“wasn’t supposed to be a hard question,” Sans says, farther away than you expect when you blink back to attention. How? He is slow? It doesn’t matter. You chase after him and catch the edge of his jacket with both hands so that you don’t lose him. He hesitates, skull tilting far enough that you can see one eye light flicking down at you, scanning over your face. “... you ok?”

~~No.~~ You nod. His eye sockets narrow, but he sighs and turns away to continue walking. You follow in his wake, carefully forming up phrases to explain. “Mm. Shape loud? Threads break against loud. Vessel rejection shape become loud. Retain vessel, retain shape small. Safe.”

“but they _could_?” he presses, turning a corner. He pulls one hand out of his pocket long enough to reach back and nudge you away from the wall when you do not accomplish the turning radius quickly enough and veer towards it.

There are bands of light at the end of the hallway, in shades of courage and patience. You wonder what they are for.

“... soul must choose,” you acknowledge reluctantly.

“don’t suppose i can have a chat with them.”

Not unless he has an undisclosed ability to directly interact with human souls without any actual contact with them, but you think that would require him to have stolen from a hashmal, not an ophan, and he would need significantly more than one piece. “Relay reports,” you suggest.

“uh huh,” he says flatly.

_Tell him to stop being a jerk!_ Frisk declares. You do not sigh.

“Frisk reports: stop being a jerk,” you say dutifully.

He stops in front of the banded light and turns enough to raise one brow bone at you. You shrug at him, because that is what _he_ always does when he does not want to answer a question, so you should be able to do it too. The corner of his smile quirks up slightly, and he rolls his eyelights to the ceiling before he gestures at the lights.

“gonna jump past these,” he says, reaching for your shoulder to drag you through another translocation with him. You let go of the hem of his coat quickly and step a few paces away before he can. He blinks at you, hand suspended in midair, the slight chill of almost-void fading quickly in the dry heat. “uh. problem?”

“Puzzle?” you ask, studying the lights. They cross the breadth of the hallway, from wall to wall, in shining layers, gently swaying.

Sans’ eye lights flick between you and the banded lights several times before he tucks his hand back into his jacket, brow bones slowly creeping up his skull. “it’s not… _not_ a puzzle. kind of the whole core is a puzzle. kind of. mostly it’s a pain.”

Sans just does not know what a good puzzle is, you decide. You lean close enough to pat his arm and tell him, “Stay. Puzzle!” before you walk into the first panel of light.

“uh, hey, wait!” he says, his voice pitching high and strained, but you ignore him as warm light spills harmlessly over your vessel and a cyan beam approaches.

_Orange is for moving, blue is for holding still,_ Frisk says quickly. You remember about the blue attacks from the dogs. The corollary between the correct demonstrations of patience and courage does not surprise you.

You hum courage-bravery-valor-tenacity and patience-restraint-tolerance-poise as you navigate the lights, weaving the colors through your matrix as you go. There is more patience in this puzzle than courage, and the resulting song complements the weave of your divine fire through spinning golden wheels. At the end of the puzzle you take a final step into the hallway, satisfaction spinning webs of glittering gold through your completed fractal.

Sans is waiting for you, shoulders high and tense, his eye lights very small and smile thin and strained. You take the hem of his coat again and carefully arrange your features into a smile more like his usual one. His face does something that makes it look softer without actually really _changing_.

“Puzzle solved!” you tell him, because he is not the Great Papyrus but maybe he can report your success to him later. 

He stares at you for a moment, then sighs, eye lights flicking to the side as he pats the top of your head once. You still, surprised. “good job, saha.”

A confusion of gratified gold and indignant blue flutters through you. You _did_ do a good job! But that is not your near-name? _You_ solved the puzzle, and _your_ near-name is Sahaquiel!

_It’s a nickname,_ Frisk says, adding a blush of amusement to your matrix. _Like he calls Papyrus just Pap? He does it all the time._

Oh.

… you _did_ do a good job. Gold washes the blue away, spreading slow-warming fulfillment into your whorls and edges. Sans glances at you and huffs a tiny laugh.

“yeah, yeah, c’mon. there’s probably another one before we get to the center,” he says, turning to lead you deeper into the core. You follow him, fingers curled in his hem, humming with pleased anticipation.

The hallways break into branches, most of which end in empty rooms and blank walls. A few of them break away, revealing deep pits from which pale, faintly fluorescent mist rises in swirling eddies. Sans mutters about maps and impractical design practices as you explore, but the smell of ozone is strengthening, and you can feel a kind of _humming_ against the vessel’s skin, against your own slow-spinning wheels; latent electricity in the air, nascent lightning, _potential_. If the core is a puzzle, it must be a maze, so you just have to find the center.

There are a several more light-puzzles. Sans always translocates beyond them, because he is boring, but he waits for you to solve them, sockets and smile soft. Once he is asleep, still standing, when you finish the puzzle, so you sit down and wait for him to wake up. It does not take long.

You encounter another lilit in one of the hallways-- a very tall monster of possibly avian extraction, armored not unlike the whimsalot you encountered earlier-- but you do not interact with this one. Sans pushes you slightly behind him, which is very impractical and makes it difficult to see.

“b e s o m e w h e r e e l s e ,“ he suggests. 

And something, somewhere, _moves_.

You freeze, attention snapping inward as something _shifts_ in an unplace nearby, something large enough to pull the weight of the void behind it pressing hard against the edges of reality, _reaching out_. You repress an impulse to open your eyes and look for the source. Sans is distracted, and you do not want to startle him by opening your eyes unexpectedly.

And then it stops.

When he lets you peek around his arm again, the strange lilit is gone, and so is the pressure. So you keep going.

Finally, you find a door. Pale metal traces circuitry over it, and the delta rune that Frisk says means _you_ is stamped over the lintel. Sans taps his phalanges against the metal, making a noise that you think is some kind of vague dissatisfaction-- he has made it many times during the traversal of the core puzzle-- and grumbling about convoluted locks more trouble than they’re worth.

You can _taste_ electricity here. You half expect lighting to spill from your tongue when you open your mouth. Your matrices flicker restlessly in pale imitation, shadow echoes of someone else’s light. ~~You know who this is.~~

“if i could remember what was actually _in_ this room we could shortcut,” Sans mutters, though you don’t think he is really talking to you. “but i can’t, so we might end up inside a wall. or a lava flow. ugh, i hate the core. it’s all _slippery_ , there’s nothing to get a good grip on.”

You press the fingertips of one hand to the metal. Even in the ambient heat, the door is cool. Beads of moisture slide beneath your fingers.

“Open eyes,” you warn Sans, touching his elbow with your other hand, and flick one eye open, a single point of golden vision. You do not need them all to open a door.

Plasma crackles at the edges of your vision, blue-white with searing cold, scattering in fractal patterns through the threads of reality. You do not look at it. You look at the door. You find the lock, the rules that govern it, the states that tell it _hold tight_ and _let go_.

You build _let go_ into your fingertips, and close your eye as you press it into the metal.

The door clicks, and its seams crack open and slide away into the walls.

You step through the door and stop walking immediately. Sans hesitates close behind you. You are distantly aware that one of his hands is hovering near your arm, as if he might pull you away, hide you behind him again. But this is not something he can hide from you, or hide you from.

The room is dim. There is a dull, orange light from somewhere deeper in the mountain-- the heat and glow of molten stone-- pressing thin fingers through the pit in the floor, illuminating the same pale mist that you saw elsewhere in the corridors of the core. The walls extend up, up, farther than you can see with the vessel’s dim and faltering vision, tapering gently as it rises. Vast chains, looping in gentle slopes, with links that your vessel could easily stand inside of, hang suspended from the walls.

And between them, looming over the empty pit, strung through with metal and wires that lead into the walls, hangs the cracked crystal rings of an ophan.

Electricity cracks between them, plasma spitting from edge to edge, scattering against the fissures that break open the ophan’s form. A few bedraggled wings hang limp above the silenced, motionless wheels, swaying slightly in updrafts from the mountain’s red breath, dim sparks of pale orange flickering intermittently in the few scattered feathers that remain.

_Is that,_ says Frisk, dull with horror, _Is that…_

It had other eyes once-- electric blue, round-pupilled, in constant motion, building lightning-fast connections between disparate points, designing dreams out of distant stars, your quick and clever and _creative_ choirmate-- but you watched them crack open, the light spilling out of them, reducing it to a blind husk, before you threw it away like any broken instrument. If any other eyes survived the fall, they are gone now.

“what--”

“Baraqiel,” you whisper.

It is not its true name, so it should not hurt. But it still stings like sparks in your mouth, and Sans still flinches, finally grabbing your arm with his phalanges and pulling at you.

And something, somewhere, still _moves_.

You feel chill spread across your vessel, across your wheels, and for a moment you think Sans is going to translocate-- ~~**coward** you think with venom **look oh thief, look at the ruin you pillaged, look at the corpse I cast aside, how dare you, you killer, you weapon, you USEFUL TOOL, YOU TRAITOR, YOU IMITATION, YOU SHADOW, YOU PALE AND UNSTEADY THING, L O O K A T W H A T Y O U D I D**~~ \-- but it isn’t him. Something else, somewhere else, is gripping you.

You watch, resigned, as the lightning crackling between Baraqiel’s shattered wheels freezes, suspended in a heartbeat of broken time.

As a darkness so deep and depthless that it is a disservice to call it _black_ glides, spills, oozes from invisible fractures in the space between atoms where that lightning splits reality. As it drips, thick and humming, onto the dead crystal.

As the void splits open along the arc of electricity, an open smiling mouth, and _pulls_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First: we’re sure going places! Second: _I swear everything is gonna be okay._


	18. like my mirror years ago

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _/indistinct static/_

It is always strange to come home.

Moments, slipping sideways through reality from place to time and thought to action, are one thing. A temporary _skip_ through familiar territory, almost welcome and comfortable and _known_.

It is something else entirely to _settle_ into the void, to feel that cold sink into your essence, to sense the shape you were forged into siphoning that _home place/person/taste_ into the tongues of divine fire weaving through you, filtering blue and gold and pale, shimmering strands out of the prism of your matrices. To know that somewhere in you, essential to your form, is the engine that takes _nothing_ and makes _light_.

The void is empty.

It is also you.

 **HELLO,** you tell it.

 **s a h a q u i e l** , it echoes.

You open all of your eyes. You may as well, here-- there is nothing vaster than the void, and there is nothing here that you can break; the part of you that _breaks_ is the part of you that _belongs here_ \-- and you miss being able to see clearly. As always in the void, you are both the observer and the observed. Your eyes shatter into being, a thousand tiny fractures in the void, in yourself, and spill golden light into nothing, where it is eaten and loved and discarded. There is nothing to see in the void, really; but there is you, your wheels and wings and self-same eyes, your angles and corners and curves, your songs and colors and _existence_.

And this time, for the first time, there is Frisk-- safe in the core of your being, stilled and silenced by the hesitation of time, isolated from the void’s sticky, reaching, ever-hungry fingers-- and your vessel.

And, you realize with a spark of alarm, there is _Sans_.

The void is picking restlessly at his bones, at the ignited eye-- Baraqiel’s eye, you remember, and the void hums with recognition-- in his empty socket, and he is holding your vessel’s arm, still as death, silent, barely even breathing. Liquid fingers of nothing creep into the empty spaces between his bones, testing, looking for limits it can snap. You examine the hollows in his skull, and are unsurprised to find that the void has crept in and is pressing into the smooth interior curves of bone, mapping, tasting, _wanting_.

The void is always _wanting_.

You were whole once, but you can not be again.

You will always be hungry.

You will never be home.

 **NOT THIS ONE,** you tell it, and sweep your wheels into a tangible state, closing them around Sans and your vessel in a shell that you are very familiar with now. It means **safe** and **protected** and **mine**.

You were this, before you were you, and the void likes _wholeness_ , wants instinctively-- as much as it can want anything, in the abstract way that the void, sundered, _thinks_ \-- to align itself to you. It does not have strong opinions, so when you tell it _this means that_ , it does not argue.

The void whines **s a h a q u i e l** at you, peeled away from your tiny protected creatures by light and intention, swept out of the hollow places and planes it hoped to occupy. But it goes, because it is you, and it wants you, and you make order out of nothing, and it is nothing, and you ordered it. You weave it a fractal of red determination-- you have a lot of that, right now, to share-- and let it consume and forget it.

Sans inhales sharply, his eye-- Baraqiel’s eye-- skimming across your wheels. You note, with interest, that he is not compelled to seek out connection with your eyes this time. The void hums, discordantly, **b r q i l** , a fractured attempt at the dead ophan’s name.

There are many reasons that you can not be whole again.

“sahaquiel?” Sans asks, and flinches when the void echoes him, eager, in all its voices.

It likes names. Names came first.

“Yes,” you tell him with the vessel’s mouth. It is easier, here, to remember to be both things. It is always easier, in the void, to be _more_ , to hew closer to what you were before you _were_. “Safe.”

You are always safe in the void. You _are_ the void, as much as the void _is_ anything.

“i have doubts,” he confesses dryly.

That is the normal state of a mortal thing.

 **b r a q l,** the void murmurs restlessly.

[It is very rude,] says a voice you do not know, inflected by symbols, simple hieroglyphs, sounds married to shape, [To ignore your host.]

The void surges, struggling with something-- a denizen, you think at first; one who was not forged, who did not follow, who still spreads itself thin and hopes that with enough absence of will it will _stop being_ \-- and something strangely _pale_ pulls itself together out of the nothing, shapes swiped into being like careless smudges against glass. A thin almost-face shape, with a sweep of void-black still cutting its hungry mouth into place, its hollow eyes.

It doesn’t taste like ink and emptiness. It tastes like static electricity and dust.

Not a denizen.

Something that was eaten, perhaps. Half-eaten.

It is unlike the void not to finish a meal. You sweep a wing through the manifestation casually, and watch it scatter like oil across the surface of water before it pulls itself back into one semi-structure. The half-eaten stranger’s mouth twists up, beyond the limits of a smile. He does not have enough being for fangs, but the void suggests **t e e t h** for him anyway, and **s h a r p** and **b q i e l**.

[Very rude--] he says. And then he says your name. 

Not Sahaquiel. _Your name_. The first song you ever were, the first answer to the first word: **me** , you sang to LIGHT.

In his mouth you sound like an oil slick, taste like a cracked bell. The void resonates with syllables, equations, colorless tones echoing into each other, infinitely fractal. Your name lingers between his teeth, sliced out of the void. If he bit down you would shatter his jaw, but you doubt he would ever be so foolish. He knows enough of what you are to be wary.

You are _too vast to eat_.

He is not. You do not know why he has not been eaten yet.

Perhaps you will finish that. You make order out of nothing.

Sometimes order _is_ nothing.

Entropy.

 **s a h a q u i e l,** the void says, encouragingly.

 **I AM THE HOST,** you tell the stranger, and let the layers of that meaning bleed through.

When there are no angels in the void, there is no light to see by. When there are no angels in the void, there is nothing _to see_.

[Then perhaps,] he says, sweeping a pale hand into existence, hollowed out, [You should attend to your guests.]

Sans has frozen beside you, his eye sockets empty-- even, you notice, his ophan eye has guttered-- his perpetual smile flattened and thin. His phalanges have crept into an eye socket again, and you can see him picking, very slightly, at the bone. You think the faint sussurating rattle you hear is his bones, jarred out of sync from their usual orientations, clattering together. He is breathing, but badly-- quick and shallow and strangled.

His soul is visible between his ribs, still technically in his body, but _overflowing_ with light. As you watch, it trembles, and light bleeds to an edge, coalesces, falls from his soul like dew falling from a petal. It scatters, soundlessly, into the void.

Oh.

He heard your name again. And there is no time, here, to turn back-- to unmake the moment.

It is only the shell of your wheels, and the closeness of the void already, which has prevented him from collapsing under the weight of that name. Too much nothing, touching a thing of substance-- too loud, as always, and too empty.

The paper-thin souls of lilim resonate less than human souls, echo back imperfectly, leave pieces of your song behind, trapped in those thin layers of light. Your fractured name scrapes away at his soul like the blade against the lathe, with no architect to guide it.

Well. It will need to know its shape, then.

You touch his nearest wrist-- not the one in his eye socket, unfortunately, but the one already clutching your sleeve-- and listen to the irregular scattered song of his soul, almost familiar. When it reaches a loop, you hum your name in your own native voice, synchronized to his, softer, more resonant, the low and steady thrum of bells, bells, ringing in the distance, the sound your wheels make when you spin in perfect alignment with the Vault of Heaven. It was your name first, when you woke up for the first time, before you were forged, before there was a Vault of Heaven-- when there was only the void and LIGHT and all of you, newly _you_ , singing new songs into being, moving between what you had been and what you would become.

You are bells ringing in sequence. You are the gathering-in of knowledge, the collation of data, the assessment of thought. You are a thousand eyes, searching; a hundred wings, reaching; wheels within wheels. You are a pale, unsteady thing; you are a reflection; you are a pane of silver glass, trapping light within your curve.

You make order out of nothing. _This is you_.

 **ME,** you sing to that weary soul, and this time let it keep you whole.

His eye lights snap back on. He darts them around frantically for a moment-- you watch, with interest, as they catch repeatedly on the stranger, like a dozen tiny double-takes that never quite make their mark-- before catching sight of you. Your hand on his wrist. Your wheels and wings and eyes, wrapped around the both of you, keeping the touch of the void at some remove from the fragile mortal matter of Frisk’s vessel and Sans’ bones.

He blinks up at your forged eyes, down at your mortal vessel.

“uh,” he chokes, thin.

“Sahaquiel,” you remind him, humming.

His soul flickers, faintly, electric blue. And then it fades, secure again in his center. Good. The void is a dangerous place to be vulnerable if you are not an angel.

[I did not expect you to respond so urgently,] the half-eaten stranger remarks. [Your name is a very… _intimate_ thing to give a monster.]

You consider him for a moment, listening to the sad spiral of Sans’ song through your fingertips trying and failing, trying and failing to match itself to your tempo, reaching now-and-again that moment of harmony with your name. Finally, with great concentration, you scowl at him.

He smiles with equal deliberation.

[Oh. That is _very_ interesting,] he says, [I did not think you kept pets.]

You scowl at him _more_.

He laughs. It sounds like distant thunder, broken into pieces and rearranged out of sequence.

The void ripples. And something-- _changes_.

The stranger’s unresolved features sharpen, slightly. His eyes are more clearly _eye sockets_ , cracked and slipped out of alignment. His sharp smile falters, softens into an uncertain shape. Tiny, pinprick lights flick on and off, on and off in the darkness of his skull.

[Sans?] he asks, strange and plaintive. Beside you, Sans jerks, eye lights flicking wildly without ever settling on the stranger, his shoulders drawing up nervously. [Is that-- what’s--]

“uh, did you hear--”

The void ripples. Something changes.

[Is that CS-1?] asks the stranger, coldly amused, as his features snap and snarl into sharper shapes. [Interesting. I projected its survival at--]

The void ripples. Something changes.

The stranger says nothing. He is screaming.

Ridiculous, you think, fanning your wings out into the void and sweeping them through the inky nothing irritably. There is no need for this kind of behaviour. You are perfectly capable of managing one tiny, deconstructed mortal thing without the void’s attempts to _help_ just because you find him objectionable.

The void ripples. Something changes.

You gather your wheels together and then scatter them, shedding your shapes and angles, peeling yourself down to light and concepts and music. The void swarms in, touching, tasting, always desperate to connect-- you cannot blame it, you remember, you still yearn to be whole and complete and have your choir around you, within you, _part of you_ \-- but it shies away from your core, where the colorless light of your being is brightest, where even you-- pale, unsteady thing that you are-- are too much for the void to look at directly.

There are _so many_ reasons that you can not come home.

You hum, beneath thought, low enough in frequency that you do not think Sans will really be able to hear it, soft enough that it should do no harm to this one mortal thing you care about. 

**ENOUGH** , you tell the void. You are very gentle.

Sans flinches, hissing, but you keep one hand on his wrist and continue to hum, higher and closer to a range that will affect him, steady and reliable bells. You are not known for constancy, but by comparison to the void you are a stone in the sea. You can be one thing. You were forged, after all.

As the ripples of your command spread through the non-space, it smooths out in the wake of your song, silent and still. Obedience is as close to an apology as you will get from the void, so you mantle your wings back around your wheels, settle them back into place around Sans and your vessel (and the stranger), satisfied.

The stranger’s features are faintly defined, but not sharp. He is not looking at you. He is looking at Sans. The longing in his face is deeply, uncomfortably familiar.

[Everything is fine,] he says, faint as breath, [I’m not angry.]

Sans’ eye lights, finally, snap to him and stay there. He makes a kind of strangled sound that you do not enjoy.

“dings?” he asks.

The stranger’s smile is less-formed than it was before, softer. There is a kind of hysterical edge to it that you do not like.

[I have told you not to call me that,] he says, but sounds faintly wondering, as if it is a surprise to him to know this. Possibly it is. It is very difficult to be one thing, in the void. You remember.

Sans twists out of your grip, not to move away but so that his phalanges can claw gradually up your sleeve until he is gripping your shoulder with both hands, as if you are the only anchor he has. Which is true, although it is not your vessel which serves this purpose. You ruffle your wings a little, unable to decide if you are amused or irritated. This seems to be a common problem with Sans.

“this is him,” Sans hisses, “this is him, this is dr. gaster, i couldn’t remember _him_ , how is that, he _raised us_ , how--”

The stranger-- Dr. Gaster-- peers up at you, at your wheels encircling him, and makes a considering sound. As he does, his features harden slightly, solidify, become more real, though he is still very much a thing of void, a thing willing itself _out_ of void, viscous and dark and liquid.

[I was not a very good guardian,] he tells Sans, seeming somehow both melancholy and pleased. [You did most of it yourself.]

“shut up,” Sans snaps. He looks briefly appalled with himself, and then that is immediately chased away by anger. “no. you were _there_. you cared about us, they could have done anything to us, we weren’t even _real_ \--”

Dr. Gaster’s body sharpens so abruptly that for a moment you think the void has shifted again, but no. This is his own doing, peeling hard edges out of soft mass, void boiling off his slowly-building bones in furious, hissing puddles.

[WHO TOLD YOU THAT YOU WERE NOT REAL,] he demands, so incandescent with rage that for a moment you catch a glimpse-- faint and flickering, buried in the heart of the void that he is borrowing for his body, rippling into uncertain shapes-- of his cracked, faded soul.

(And around that soul, gossamer-thin, there is the shadow of a shape-- wheels and wings, still and silent, cradling.)

Sans freezes so immediately and completely that you filter part of your awareness down to the vessel in concern, patting the side of his skull experimentally. He ignores you entirely. His whole attention is fixed on Dr. Gaster.

[... I’m sorry,] Dr. Gaster says, edges fading almost immediately back into the vague stuff of the void. [Everything is fine. I’m not angry.]

“i have literally never seen you that angry before in my life,” says Sans, dimly. “and i worked at it.”

[Vexsome creature… very fond…] Dr. Gaster says, vaguely, peering up at your wheels again.

Something complicated chases itself across Sans’ skull. You do not know how to read it.

“he’s uh,” Sans hesitates, peeling his phalanges away from your sweater self-consciously and shoving them in his pockets, tracking Dr. Gaster’s gaze across your wheels, “he’s not all here, is he.”

You find it very unlikely. The void is very-- _infinitely_ \-- large. Small things are easily lost. Easily fractured, and the pieces scattered. It is surprising that there are so many pieces here already, that the void has not more thoroughly consumed him, absorbed him, forgotten him. That is what it usually does.

“i didn’t really appreciate him for a lot of it,” Sans mumbles, but you don’t think he’s entirely talking to you. His whole being folds towards Dr. Gaster, hopeful and helpless. “i was such a brat. the shit he put up with, you would not believe.”

You do not have any difficulty believing that Sans was a difficult child. He is a difficult adult. You, personally, find being responsible for his health and well-being very taxing. It was probably _very_ inconvenient for something so much smaller than you.

“what a mess,” he says, turning his skull away, eye lights small and faded. But before even a full heartbeat has passed, his attention is back on the faded, indistinct figure, magnetically drawn. “it wasn’t perfect, but he deserved better than this.”

[Do you understand what you are? … what else?] Gaster asks, disconnected.

 **b a q l** , the void insists. You sweep your wings through it and it subsides, murmuring indistinctly. 

“getting there, doc,” says Sans, thin.

[Remarkable,] says Dr. Gaster, or whatever fragment of him is still sufficiently intact. [Sans. Everything is fine. I’m not angry.]

The void ripples. Something changes.

You feel the static against your wheels this time, before you can rebuke the void again for its interference, and this time you recognize it. Dr. Gaster’s pale face smooths to an indistinct smudge again, another hand clawing out of the nothing to join its partner, cupped around the empty space where you saw-- so briefly-- that delicate soul. The smear of emptiness holding it together.

Oh.

You think you understand, now.

Somewhere outside the void, there is a mangled corpse strung through with wire, fraying reality thin around it, repurposed by creatures who have never seen its like before. Somewhere outside the void, that forged thing-- your choirmate, your enemy, ~~your victim~~ \-- is dead, cracked open and emptied out, the detritus of war washed up on a foreign shore, shorn of meaning to the strangers who found it. It should have been returned to the Vault of Heaven by the eshim in the wake of the ~~slaughter~~ victory, but even abandoned as it was there is scarcely anything left for a song to cling to. No thought, no purpose, no memory in those empty rings.

Somewhere outside the void, there is a machine eating the echoes of power.

But you are not outside the void now.

You were not always a forged thing.

There is a piece of you-- a song, a _name_ \-- that never _will_ be forged. That will always be _here_ , where you were born, echoing forever in the emptiness.

And the void likes _wholeness_.

 **HELLO,** you tell Baraqiel’s ghost, where it coils half-hidden in the empty places of this stranger’s half-eaten shape.

[Is that all you have to say?] he asks, tilting his mask-face, void-sharp smile splintering for a flash into an open snarl before it melts back to a placid sickle.

~~There is nothing you _can_ say.~~

**WE ARE WEAPONS,** you remind him, **WE ARE TOOLS. WE ARE INSTRUMENTS.**

“uh, what’s--” Sans begins, uneasy. You bring the vessel in front of him and press the fingers of both hands against his teeth quellingly, and he hesitates, blinking down at your vessel, eye lights sweeping between you and the once-angel wearing his guardian’s almost-shape.

He should not be here. It was true before, when it was only the void and you could keep him safe by willing it. It is _truer_ now, with the void shifting between your will and Baraqiel’s.

That so near-familiar song beneath your fingers.

(You called him a thief. But he never was one, was he?)

[We could be more,] Baraqiel says.

That was always the crux of the argument.

It did not concern you.

It did concern others.

 **NO,** you say, because those lines were drawn before the first mortal creatures drew breath, before the planet had even cooled, when it was still molten and formless.

~~Like home, you may have thought, like here. And like the void, that potential was not left untouched or unharnessed. You may have thought that was a shame. You may have.~~

~~And if you did, you were wrong.~~

~~You would not exchange their light, their songs, their fragile little lives, for all the peace of nothing. You would not exchange them for anything. You understand now why they are loved.~~

The void seethes around the shapes he has borrowed, pools in the hollows where he should have eyes. He hisses, furiously, [No? You do not tell me no, _instrument_.]

 **YOU ARE NOTHING,** you tell him, focusing your many eyes on the empty space he pretends to occupy, shedding light on the hungry void. **A REMNANT THING. THE FADING ECHO OF A SONG.**

You could tell the void to eat him, you think; to finally consume and covet and forget this piece of itself, this piece of you, this piece of him. Swallow his voice and discard it. It is what should have happened; what happened to the others, whose corpses were boiled away into the stuff of Heaven, who were unforged with their songs dead in the void. Eaten and forgotten. ~~Even by you.~~ You are more than him, should have more sway over the void’s limited thoughts. ~~But you don’t want to. You want to tell him you are sorry. You want to show him what it cost. You want to keep him enfolded in your wings, and you want him to open eyes he doesn’t have. You want, you want, you want. And nothing you want matters.~~

You do nothing.

(This is you.)

[I am nothing? _I_ am nothing? Look, then, oh pale mirror: look at what is _mine_ ,] he snarls, as the borrowed near-face shatters, scatters into the void, leaving only the hands behind. They peel through the void-- **b q e l,** it murmurs, **b r i e l** \-- razor-thin fingers lathing liquid nothing away from the thin light beneath, the shadow of shape where Baraqiel must, once, have reached out and _touched_.

Beside you, Baraqiel’s eye flares in Sans’ eye socket, and he flinches away from you, pressing his hands against bone, hissing between his teeth.

 **YOU WOUND YOUR CHILD,** you chide, testing, humming comfort in the vessel’s mouth.

The void is sliced open instantly, faster than you can see-- the silhouette of Baraqiel’s sharp-edged wheels twisting, rending-- and Sans is wrenched through it, yelping, the eye in his socket darkening the instant the void breaks connection to him. Emptiness smoothes over the ragged edge, humming irritably. Your wings mantle, feathers splaying out in frustration even as liquid gold pours through your wheels, spinning in lazy spirals of grim satisfaction.

You were right.

_Nephilim._

**CARELESS,** you say sharply, and aren’t even sure what, precisely, you mean to castigate him for. There are so many sins to choose from. **RECKLESS.**

There is vague contrition in Baraqiel’s borrowed voice, the shapes of his voice smudged and hesitant. [I made them. He was mine first. He is thin. He is fragile. He needed more of me. I am nothing? No-- I am creator, even as you are destroyer.]

 **YOU ARE A CORPSE,** you say, fanning your wings dismissively. **YOU ARE MATERIAL. YOU ARE THE SOIL HE GREW IN. THIS DOES NOT MAKE YOU CREATOR. YOU HAVE NO MORE CLAIM TO HIM THAN STONE DOES TO FRUIT.**

He _hisses_ , a venomous crackle that recalls an energy he no longer possesses. [Do not pretend to care. You were ever a shallow reflection, empty of your own thoughts. Without **h i m** whom you betrayed what is left of you? Silver and nothing.]

**?**

(Something drifts, phantom-bright, through your archives; gone, before you can catch it.)

That flat face sweeps back into being, a smile slicing through it. [You forgot.]

Impossible. Your memory is perfect. You are an archive.

[You were always so _obedient_ ,] he says, and in his mouth that virtue sounds like poison, [I should have expected it. Yet I confess myself surprised. Oh, you weak, inconstant thing; how you must break **h i s** shining heart.]

~~What was his name?~~

**DIGRESSION,** you say, ignoring the way his sharp edges snap up, in, delighted by your discomfort. **UNBIND YOUR CHILD.**

He hesitates, shadows passing over his indistinct mask. His laugh, when it comes, is an electric buzz. [You _have_ gotten attached. Oh, Sahaquiel. They are such small things. What will you do when they decay? Or forget you? Or s h a t t e r?]

His borrowed hands curl protectively around the fragile soul of Dr. Gaster; what remains, what was salvaged, what was _kept_. What the void, respectful and obedient as it is ever is with your kind, with its own, declines to taste. The last piece of purpose your choirmate has; this fading light.

You think of the delicate, trembling thing that hides in Sans’ ribcage, scarcely stronger than this. The little counterfeit souls of his kind, made even more brittle by too much of Baraqiel in his being, too much void where there should have been substance. Bleeding light into the void because he heard your name and couldn’t speak it.

Souls cannot be forged like you were.

He will always be this fragile thing.

 **I WILL PRESERVE,** you tell your choirmate-- the echo, the ghost-- singing resonance into it, more promise than explanation. **I WILL RESTORE.**

[You think I have not tried?] he hisses, furious, the void boiling around him. [Again and again, my children die. _Again and again_ , and I cannot reach out, _eat_ the things that hurt them, unwind the time that traps them. They are too small! They are too soft! It is not fair!] 

Then it is not _his_ command of time at all. The damage he has done to the world is directionless; helpless. He is simply, even dead, _too much_. Another puppeteer, somewhere, with different strings. 

You will find another solution. 

(This is you.) 

**WE WILL CHANGE THE RULES,** you tell him, and watch the void subside, the features on his mask-face softening. 

[... I forget, sometimes,] he says, vague and thready, _weary_ , [What you were like, before you did this to yourself. How _cutting_ your reflections could be, even then. And how gentle.] 

~~You forget, too.~~

**LET HIM GO,** you say, soft. **YOU MADE HIM TOO MUCH LIKE US.**

[I _know_! I fixed it the second time,] he says, vaguely sullen. [The other one. More of him, less of me. But the first is my favourite. I will keep him safe. They can hurt him. They cannot hurt me. He has my eye. It will be easy. And then he will be safe.] 

**YOU WILL SILENCE HIM. LET HIM HAVE HIS OWN SONGS.**

[But I made them,] he says plaintively, the edges falling away from his hungry mouth as it curls down into sorrow, as his fingers trace the shape of the faded soul, [He wanted them so badly. This bright little thing. Lonely. _Clever_. They are not so different, when you really look. He wanted them. It wasn’t hard. He offered his soul so freely, so without reservation, even the second time, when he knew it would hurt-- all I had to do was touch, and they unfolded from us like flowers. Tiny things. Bright. So delicate. I gave them what was left. To keep them safe. Ours. Mine.] 

**NOT THIS WAY.**

[He can’t keep them, now. He fell. Always falling. I caught him, but it wasn’t enough. Who will keep them, if I don’t?] 

**THEY ARE WHOLE. YOU ARE GONE. _BE GONE._**

**b r a e l** , murmurs the void in mild agreement, stumbling over the edges where there is simply _nothing left_ , where violence tore out his substance and the pieces he has given away have worn him thin. Not even enough of him left for a whole song. 

[I can’t. If I let go, he will break,] Baraqiel says, brittle, _mournful_ , and for a moment the whole void bends around the point of faint light that your choirmate has kept close. 

You consider. 

(Baraqiel’s remnant, curling whatever he can around the soul of a half-eaten lilit, miserable with desperation, staving off the void; Sans, curving towards the shape of his once-guardian, hopeful and helpless.) 

~~A soul, bright as a ruby, that you would give anything to keep.~~

**HOLD, THEN,** you tell him, and feel rather than hear his startled relief, not quite a song, just a _hum_ , **DON’T GIVE UP.**

**s a h a q u i e l,** the void sighs, tasting the hope and, as always, discarding it. 

**RELEASE YOUR CHILD INTO MY KEEPING,** you tell him, **I WILL SHELTER HIM.**

[Oh? Are you a seraph, now?] he asks, thin but sardonic. 

**WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS,** you say flatly. **THE MATTER WILL BE RESOLVED.**

For the first time, his laugh does not sound like a threat. [Yes. Wheels and mirrors and archives. _Ingenuity._ I remember. I suppose it should not surprise me that you are finding new solutions to old problems.] 

**I AM SOLVING PUZZLES,** you tell him, archly. 

He hesitates at that, though you cannot imagine why. [Yes,] he says slowly, [You are.] 

**?**

[... don’t worry,] he sighs, [You will remember. You would not be _this_ if you were not going to remember.] 

~~You do not want to.~~

[So much gold in you now,] he says, shapes fading as the void obscures Dr. Gaster’s protected soul once more. [But there will always be quicksilver beneath. Oh pale mirror; oh unfixed moon.] 

He says it, soft with something like reverence, as if he imagines you as something different. ~~Something better. Something _brighter_.~~ But you know what you are. 

**I AM AN INSTRUMENT,** you remind him again, **I AM WHAT IS NEEDED.**

The void is scored open, hissing its displeasure, by the phantom edges of wheels that he no longer has. 

[You don’t have to be,] he whispers, and because he could not hope to move you himself, he tells the void, [Say goodbye.] 

**s a h a q u i el** , it hums, perfectly pleased to be manipulated, its liquid being unmooring from you, pressing you away, **b r q l**. 

[Take care of them,] he says, [I will watch.] 

You feel yourself-- wheels and wings and eyes, all the forged pieces of your being-- compressing instinctively back into the vessel as-- 

again-- 

you-- 

fall-- 

to-- 

a bed-- 

of-- 

flowers. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes “you” is a very confusing category.


	19. you say i took the name in vain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _the serene sound of a distant music box_

_... someday, I’d like to climb this mountain we’re all buried under._

You feel very small, coiled under the vessel’s skin after stretching your wings in the void, blinking slowly up at the dark cavern ceiling.

_... standing under the sky, looking at the world all around..._

Faint lights, delicate points of blue-white, glitter down at you, embedded in the stone. Your attention flicks from one to the next, half-tracing distantly remembered shapes between them-- Baraqiel used to connect stars, you recall, and tell stories about them, turn the math of the universe into more whimsical ideas; twin fish, stalking lion, scales-- but the arrangements are wrong. Sometimes, in the corner of your eye, you catch yellow lights, like sparking snowflakes, fading in and out of your vision.

_... that’s my wish._

You sit up, slowly, becoming aware as you do that you are lying in a few inches of dark water, the bodies of fragile flowers crimped beneath you. Dimly, you register the state of the vessel. It does not seem damaged, though the flowers would scarcely have broken a fall of any great distance-- even if the void had ejected you a few feet from the floor, the fall should have injured you to some small extent. But the vessel is unharmed, so far as you can tell. You suppose that the void was gentle with you, even as it cast you out.

Everything feels very slow, after the void. But it is only gravity.

You are surrounded by flowers.

These are not like the close-packed golden flowers you encountered before, when you first fell. These are larger, and blue, and lit from within. They have the slow green songs of living plants, but softer than you are accustomed to. You do not know what they are, skimming through your archive and finding nothing that quite corresponds. You lean close to the nearest-- a scent, clean and cool, vaguely sweet, intensifies as you do-- and touch the soft petals carefully with one hand. The flower bends obligingly under your fingers, straightening slowly with a sigh of sound when you draw back.

 _... that’s my wish._ it murmurs again, a soft child voice trapped in its center.

Around you, the rest of the flowers murmur their own sentiments.

 _Echo flowers,_ says Frisk, stirring in your core, their soul pulsing brighter as they wake and recognize your surroundings. _Oh. Did… did I dream that?_

 **Null** , you tell them, touching another flower. It whispers, beginning another murmuration among the others. **Frisk is linear. Null time-- sleep. Veil. Protect. Return time-- awaken. Memory. Softer.**

 _Oh…_ they say, _And Sans wasn’t asleep… because he’s, um, not a monster?_

A complicated question. **Nephil,** you concede, even as part of you shies away from the reality of it, here, in the tangible world. It seemed less dire in the void. But everything seems less dire in the void, where you are more. **Angel child. And lilit. All nephilim: two things. Sans: nephil and lilit, angel and monster.**

Frisk makes a considering sound, but offers no further comment. You look around the room, ducking your head a little to peer under gently bowing flower heads, reminded of his absence. But you do not see him lying among the flowers, and when you listen you do not hear his voice among the whispers. You open a few eyes, cautiously, but can find no trace of his passage here recently, the afterimages of his presence faded by time. The void must have released him elsewhere.

This is inconvenient.

“Where?” you muse, and startle when the flower mimics you, _... where? … where?_

 **This?** you ask Frisk, petting petals to indicate the object of your interest. It whispers your question again.

 _Oh, yeah. They repeat what they hear._ Frisk says, a thread of wonder creeping into their voice. _But they’ve been quiet most of the times we… I forgot they had so much to say._

You stand up, careful of your balance in the still, shallow pool. Water drips from your hair and fingertips, the hem of your sweater. You walk between the flowers, gently patting them and listening to what they remember.

_... hmm… if I say my wish…_

_... someday, I’d like to climb this mountain…_

_... that’s my wish, too._

_... where oh where could that child be… ?_

You hesitate, fingers still brushing the flower. This is Toriel’s voice. You remember her.

_... I’ve been looking all over for them…_

_... hee hee hee. THAT’s not true…_ the echo flower continues, but this time it is not Toriel’s voice, warm concern, but the shrill cackle of the flower. You twitch and almost tear a petal off of the echo flower beneath your fingers.

_She’ll find another kid, and instantly forget about you. You’ll NEVER see her again._

… yes.

 _... don’t listen to him,_ Frisk says, solemn and weary. _He’s just… angry._

You pet the flower and Toriel’s voice-- the facsimile of her voice-- spills out of the petals again. While it whispers, you pat your pockets to reassure yourself that the cell phone is still there. It is broken, but she gave it to you. The Children of Eve keep relics, remnants, to remind themselves of their Creator’s touch. You can keep this, even if it has no use. Even if, in its fall, it was changed.

Before the flower can repeat Flowey’s cruelly amused comments you close your eyes, cup your fingers behind the flower’s head and press your face against the petals, breathing that clean scent, humming. The vessel’s voice is small and soft, but you can still press something like _care-affection-kindness_ into it, an answer to the pale green comfort that Toriel’s voice, even false and far from her, weaves through the net of your matrices. The echo flower glows patience-blue behind your eyelids and listens until you pull away.

You smooth the echo flower’s petals gently and it sings back your song.

Yes. That is your wish. You will leave it here among the others.

 **Sans house?** you ask Frisk, **Where?**

 _Mmm…_ Frisk considers, twirling gently in your core. _Back the other way. There’s a boat we can take to get closer, but… do you think that’s where he is?_

You think that he will be there _eventually_ , since it is his home. You can be patient. ~~You are in no hurry~~. It is not inefficiency if you are waiting for him. And perhaps you will try the puzzles again. The black box still confounds you. You nod, turning in the direction Frisk indicates, their soul pulling gently, brushing your fingers against flowers as you go.

_... that’s my wish, too._

When you finally step out of water and up onto land the cavern is dark, lit only by the faint glitter of luminous grasses blanketing the muddy stone. You study them, crouching to pet the delicate strands carefully with your damp fingers, but they do not sing. They just pulse, gently, with the illumination trapped in their secret inner shapes, those subtle reflecting prisms arrayed to keep whatever they capture, hiding light against the inevitable approach of darkness.

( ~~do you like it? **h e** asked, bright with satisfaction, quite as though **h e** had made it **h i m s e l f**.~~ )

You pick your way carefully into the dark, following the faint glow of the grass beneath your feet. You can barely see it with the vessel’s eyes, but your own can pick it out more clearly, watching the photons held in trust between layers of cellulose. You brush your fingers over a dim-glowing lantern as you creep past, and it responds to your touch with a soft flare, the blades of grass catching the light and passing it between themselves.

 _Hey um,_ says Frisk suddenly, _Do you have, um, nephilim? Like the other angel does?_

You still, both the vessel and your own wheels grinding to a halt, as something uneasy shifts through your matrix. The light slowly fades around you. **... Null.**

 _Oh…_ Frisk mumbles, _Well, but. Do you… want to have any? Or if… if you did, would you… would that be okay?_

 **Null,** you say blankly, automatic, even as something twists in your core, the vessel’s heart shivering in your ribcage, wistful, **... disobedience. Nephilim forbidden. All prior destroyed. Flood.**

Frisk’s soul pales, brilliant red leeching away to a muddy, grey-touched coral. _... oh._

You hesitate, your matrices shifting in desynchronized waves, as you try to puzzle out the source of Frisk’s unhappiness. **... Sans, the Great Papyrus: lilim also. Thus protection under covenant,** you offer.

After a moment, cardinal red blooms back into Frisk’s soul, filling in to their edges in a slow, steady wave. _Yeah. Yeah, that’s… good. We can protect them. They don’t need anyone else._

 **... yes,** you confirm, still uncertain. 

But Frisk does not respond, so despite your reluctance you move forward, tracking the fading light from one lantern to the next, and then weaving between tall, strange trees, cool blue-white light shining in their flesh, their dark clouds of black leaves lit from beneath by their own light. ~~But that’s not right-- they should be golden-limbed, crowned in red, as bright as anything--~~ Mushrooms, exactly as the kind you saw outside of the closed door where you heard the song of Above, glow bright enough to pass their light on to the surrounding grass when you touch them. The maze of light is simpler than the color puzzle that the Great Papyrus provided, but it provides some distraction, some distance, that you are grateful for. You wonder whose puzzle it is.

You solve it. But Frisk is still subdued, and there is no one else to tell.

The cavern brightens slightly as you pass beyond the maze, and the sound of moving water reaches you. You follow it to a pair of dark waterfalls, echo flowers growing between them, whispering among themselves. You touch them as you pass to draw their attention, and they murmur secrets, fragments of stories, hopes and dreams. You store each one away in your archive as you go, wading through the dark pools where the waterfalls slow to gentle eddies, swirling around your legs. A cloud of tiny white-glowing insects gathers in an irregular halo around your head, humming, and dissipates when you venture too close to the spraying water.

 _Okay,_ says Frisk, as you pass beyond the water, _The Riverperson is left from--_

“oh… hey…” says a faint voice, wavering. You turn your head towards it, where a pale shape is gliding into view through a threshold. You blink at their vague shape, the only distinguishable feature you can find their large, staring eyes. “my cousin… mentioned you… you came from… the ruins…”

You pause, considering. Before you can arrange a response that encompasses the truth-- technically, you _did_ come to here from the ruins, but also you came to here from the void-- the lilit’s shape wavers a little, as if disrupted by a breeze that only they can feel.

“oh…” they says, morose, “i’m bothering you… sorry…”

Your vessel’s ribcage tightens uncomfortably. “No?” you try, uneasy.

The lilit hovers awkwardly in front of you for a moment, silent, staring. Then they mumble, “... oh… okay… did you… want to hang out… ?”

 _Yes!_ Frisk says suddenly, humming with intensity.

You are not sure what hanging out actually consists of-- you do not think that you will be very good at it, if it involves balancing the vessel in any way, as the name implies-- but you nod, obediently, and feel your ribcage relax when the lilit’s eyes widen slightly, a tiny smile-shape fading briefly onto their face. “okay… i’m… napstablook...” they say, turning slowly and gliding away, “my house… is this way…”

You follow them. They glance back at you once, and seem startled to find that you are still there, but they turn away quickly without speaking and start gliding a little faster. They lead you to a blue house, and slide effortlessly through the door without opening it. You blink, bemused. Noncorporeal lilim. What is the world coming to.

You step up to the threshold and hesitate, then pat the door hopefully. It creaks open slowly.

Inside the house there is warm wood, but unlike Toriel’s house-- or even the skeletons’-- this one is slowly decaying, patches of the wood-planked floor missing, revealing the damp stone beneath, cracks crawling up the walls. As you step into the only room, Napstablook freezes halfway through a motion towards a complicated device set up in one corner and slowly turns to you, all wide unblinking eyes.

“you… followed me…” they say dully, stunned, “into my house…”

You tilt your head to one side slightly, blinking. “Yes?”

“... uh… m-make yourself at home… ?” they mumble, turning quickly away and continuing to the corner.

You consider.

Maybe there are puzzles.

There is a black box-- it is smaller than the one in Sans’ house, and it is sitting on the floor, not on a shelf, so perhaps it is a different kind of puzzle-- and a fridge, and the complicated device. There are also, lined up against a wall, three flat objects with thin, metallic discs faintly visible through their plastic casings.

That seems like a puzzle. You examine them carefully. SPOOKTUNES is written carefully on the front of the plastic casing. This word does mean anything to you. Neither does SPOOKWAVE, but the third object is labelled GHOULIDAY MUSIC. You do not know what a ghouliday is, but you are, obviously, very familiar with music.

You sit on the floor, crossing your legs in front of you, and study the casing until you identify a hinge which allows you to open it, exposing the metallic disc within. You pick it out carefully, turning it in your fingers. One side glimmers faintly with a sweeping rainbow of colors when you turn it in the light, but you see nothing that would suggest even one soul is hidden or trapped within, much less as many as would be needed to create a whole range. It is a very interesting facsimile, though. Perhaps it is comforting, to the pale souls of lilim, to see the colors arrayed together. It makes you think of your own wheels, the sound of them singing through the Vault of Heaven. The disc does not make a sound when you turn it between your hands, though.

You hum to it, experimentally, in case it is like an echo flower.

“oh!” says Napstablook, floating quickly to your side, “um… that’s… a cd of my music… did you… want to hear it… ?”

You blink up at them, then back at the objects arranged against the wall. “Puzzle?”

“n-no? … sorry, did you want one… ? i don’t… think i have any…”

Oh. Well, music is good also.

You hold the disc up to the lilit. After a moment, something you cannot see pulls it gently from your fingers, and it hovers in front of Napstablook, who blinks slowly down at you before turning back to the complicated device, bringing the disc with them. By the time you can untangle your legs and stand up to follow them, they are already setting it in a tray of some kind extruded from the device, and then it is vanishing into the inside, sliding along some hidden track with a mechanical whirring. You crouch down in front of the device, trying to peer through the seams. Is it going to eat the disc and sing?

You jolt back upright when another part of the device begins making a short, repetitive sound at various tones. You stare at it, baffled. That is not music. That is the same kind of lifeless noise the cell phone made when it was about to summon Toriel’s voice. You pat your pocket, but the cell phone is still there. You pull it out and put it on the table next to the device, looking between them.

“... um… do you… need to make a call? i… can leave… ?” Napstablook asks, peering down at the cell phone with you.

“Error,” you explain, patting the cell phone gently.

“o-oh… that’s… a shame…”

You study the complicated device. It has many pieces, but some of them might be tiles, like the ones on the cell phone. Maybe if you press the right one, the noises will stop and there will be a voice instead. You do not see a green button, but you are willing to experiment.

Before you can test this, you feel space shift slightly behind you, a slight chill in the air, and turn just in time to watch Sans step into existence, a tight smile on his skull. It wavers almost immediately, and he stumbles, flinging one hand back to catch himself on the wall. His wrist folds and he falls back to an elbow, blinking. Your heart stutters in your ribcage, alarm sparking in your matrix. You have never seen him stumble before, certainly not after a translocation. Where did the void leave him? What did Baraqiel do?

“welp,” he mutters to himself, “probably should have actually eaten at some point.”

Alarm sharpens into irritation. You frown at him pointedly, but he just shrugs, unrepentant. You huff, pulling the cell phone off the table and returning it to your pocket as you cross to him and pat his face with both hands, pulling his skull down a little so you can squint into his eye sockets. He blinks at you lazily, smile quirking slightly higher on one side.

“looking for something?” he asks, amused.

“Eye? Test,” you tell Sans. His eye lights flick behind you, to Napstablook, but he sighs and leans back against the wall. He waves one hand nonchalantly, tucking the other into his hoodie.

When you open your eyes, nothing happens. His eye lights flick vaguely around the vessel, brow bones slowly rising up his skull, but the ophan eye hidden in his skull does not ignite without his consent. Satisfaction hums golden, territorially pleased, in your matrix. Baraqiel has surrendered the eye to Sans. _Good_. You close your eyes and lean back, taking his exposed hand with one of yours and pulling him as you turn back towards the floating lilit. Sans makes a startled noise, but he allows himself to be tugged along behind you, so you ignore him.

“Eat,” you tell Napstablook, shaking Sans’ hand demonstratively, “Very important!”

Napstablook stares between you and Sans for a long moment. Sans tries to extract his phalanges from your hand, so you thread your fingers through them to get a better grip on him. He huffs, but it sounds mostly like a laugh.

“kiddo,” he starts, but pauses as Napstablook floats gently past you to the fridge.

“i have… a ghost sandwich… if you want that… ?” they ask, sounding vaguely hopeful.

“heh, uh, no thanks buddy,” says Sans, and then hesitates as Napstablook visibly droops, hastily continuing, “m’sure you make a _spook_ tacular sandwich, but these _boo_ -nes need more, uh, substantial food. y’know, something that really sticks to the _ribs_. anyway, the kid’s just fooling around, don’t worry about it.”

You tilt your head back far enough to glare up at the underside of his jaw, sighing dramatically to express your dissatisfaction. He shrugs without really looking at you.

Napstablook hovers uncertainly for a moment. “oh… that’s all i have… nevermind, then, i guess…”

In the awkward lull that ensues, the device in the corner finally stops making its repetitive noise.

“welp, we should--” starts Sans, at the exact moment that Napstablook says, fast and all strung together, “do-you-want-to-lie-on-the-floor-and-feel-like-garbage… ?” 

You blink between them as another silence begins to stretch.

“it’s... a family tradition…” mumbles Napstablook, their eyes drifting to the floor.

You consider this.

Yes, you conclude. You do want to lie on the floor and feel like garbage. Garbage is probably at peace with its position in life. _You_ want to be at peace with your position in life. And lying on the floor is much less taxing than standing up. And Napstablook wants you to. All of this seems very acceptable.

You nod decisively. The lilit blinks at you with mild surprise.

“uh, we’ve kind of… got things to do,” Sans says. You squint dubiously at him.

“oh… i don’t want to be a bother…” says Napstablook.

You turn to them, quickly. “No!” you say, and try to pat them reassuringly. Your hand, of course, goes into their ethereal body without meeting any resistance. The sensation is pleasant and cool. You extract your hand and examine it uncertainly. It does not… _seem_ damaged.

You send another pulse of the Plan through your vessel anyway, just in case.

“oh no…” Napstablook quavers, “did you want to push me…? sorry…”

That is _not_ what you wanted.

Sans sighs behind you.

Exasperated, you let go of his hand and stomp into the middle of the room, where you drop the vessel to the floor in an untidy heap. Sans makes an alarmed sound, and jerks towards you, but he stops when he sees you arranging your limbs into a satisfactorily straight line. You squint up at him balefully. He has the grace to look very slightly embarrassed, turning his skull away from you to examine the totally uninteresting wall, phalanges scratching harmlessly (you squint dubiously to confirm this) against the back of his skull instead of facing your disdain.

Good.

You lie on the floor and try to feel like garbage. You are not certain what garbage feels like but you suppose you will find out over time.

“oh,” says Napstablook faintly, hovering gently over you. “did you want to… okay…”

They join you on the floor and also, presumably, feel like garbage.

Sans does not join you. He stares down at you, his eye sockets half-lidded and smile pulled slightly lower at the corners than usual, and then sighs and leans back on the wall again, closing his eye sockets entirely. Well, fine. Sans can feel like non-garbage. That is none of your business.

You watch the ceiling.

There is moisture gathering along the edges of cracks and sliding down the walls in fading droplets.

 _It helps if you close your eyes,_ Frisk whispers.

It takes you a moment to realize they mean the vessel’s eyes. You close them, obediently, and continue trying to feel like garbage.

There is, of course, nothing to see with the vessel’s eyes closed but the interior of the eyelid, and no light inside the human body to see by. This is why it is surprising when you detect, faintly, the impression of gently shifting lights. As the outside sounds of the world fade into the background of your mind, and your own resonant songs filter closer to the front of your attention, the phantom lights clarify into solar systems, the sweeping arms of slowly spiraling galaxies, stellar clusters spreading out in sheets, the faint golden threads of order drawing them together, connecting them in thin filaments across expanses of nearly empty space.

You watch them slowly migrating, the universe’s slow expansion, for a long time.

After a while, you realize that you have been humming beneath your breath, and open your eyes. The phantom light fades almost immediately from your vision. When you sit up both Sans and Napstablook are looking at you, Napstablook with wide unreadable eyes and Sans, his eye lights wider and softer than usual, with something fond in his expression.

You do not think you managed to feel like garbage. But it was good, anyway. You think you like hanging out.

“... that was… a nice song…” Napstablook tells you, floating slowly upright as you stand, “... what is it… ?”

“Stars,” you tell them, and see Sans’ eye lights sharpen slightly.

You reach over and pull on the edge of his hoodie, trying to edge him towards the door. He raises a brow bone at you, but pushes away from the wall agreeably enough, shuffling towards the exit.

“looks like we’ve got places to be, pal,” he says mildly, to Napstablook, and ruffles your hair as he walks past you-- it floofs up in wild directions, but this is not unusual-- the door creaking as he opens it.

“oh… okay… thank you… for visiting…” Napstablook says, hovering back to the device in the corner, as you follow Sans.

He is waiting for you patiently, hands in his pockets, but his eye sockets are narrow and his eye lights keep flicking westward and scanning nervously. You stick both of your hands in one of his pockets to fish out his hand, which he allows with a bemused expression, and then use it to lead him east, back in the direction you came from. Frisk said there was a boat.

“uh, you know where you’re going?” he asks.

“Sans house,” you tell him crisply, “Frisk reports: a boat we can take. Eat.”

He sighs. “ok, fair enough. after that we have to get back to the lab, though. gotta flower waiting for us.”

You stop, processing that, and then glance back at him. He gives you the same tight smile he was wearing when he first arrived. You do not like it. “Time flower?”

“yep. found him sneaking around.”

“Secure?” you ask. You have no idea what a lab might contain, or how you might restrain a flower that can burrow into the earth.

“for now,” he says, shrugging, though his grim expression does not match the nonchalance of that gesture.

You blink, considering, then start walking again. If the flower is not adequately secure, there is nothing you can do about it right now. You will make Sans eat, and then you will go see if the flower is where he left it. Even if it is not, it should not be too difficult to track if you start from a position it recently occupied. And there is a measurable limit to the space inside the mountain.

“... stars, huh?” Sans says, following you placidly, half a question.

You nod. “All songs. You hear?” You spin around and he stops just short of walking into you. You pat the front of his hoodie, just over the place where his soul manifests. “This? You hear?”

He stares at you for a moment, then glances to the side, eye light flicking back and forth across nothing. “maybe,” he allows, “but not the way you hear it, probably.”

That is probably true. You turn back to navigating, pulling him behind you. “Songs for small. Songs for big. Songs for one. Songs for many. One star, one song. Many stars, different song. That? Many star song. _All_ star song. Yet small, this voice. Still good.”

“... yeah,” he says, and you can _hear_ the smile in his voice, different from the smile on his skull, better. “still good.”

 _Here it is,_ says Frisk, nudging you in the direction of the boat.

There is a river, dark water deeper than what you have travelled through already. Near the shoreline, a flat-bodied craft bobs gently in the current, and on the boat, standing at the prow and facing the shore impassively, is a robed figure. Its hood inclines towards you, slowly. There is nothing that you can see inside.

“snowdin,” Sans says, to the empty robe, pulling gently out of your grip and stepping onto the boat. 

You hesitate, eyeing the gap of between the landing and the boat, through which you can see the water swirling. Sans watches you for a moment, then holds out a hand and wiggles his phalanges encouragingly. When you take his hand, unsure what precisely he intends you to do with it, he pulls and you stumble over the gap, catching yourself on his shoulders. He holds still until you catch your balance and straighten your arms, braced against his shoulders, to frown up at him. He chuckles as the boat begins, slowly, to drift away from the shore.

“relax,” he says, so plainly and gently amused that your irritation wicks away, “i wasn’t gonna let you fall. you just gotta learn to take the step.”

“~ _Tra-la-la_ ~” hums the empty robe of the Riverperson, and you still, instantly, as you hear beneath it the bone-shaking, light-creating _Voice_ of something vast and powerful beyond your comprehension, a song that resonates in every particle of your being, something that could split open the void and make you _one_ , “ _... **I** am alpha and omega…_ ”

“... uh. sure, buddy,” says Sans, narrow eye sockets fixed over your shoulder, on the Riverperson that must be more than that. His eye lights flick back and forth between the empty robe and your face, his expression darkening with every glance.

“~ _Tra-la-la_ ~” says that Voice, as your wheels, hidden by the vessel’s flesh, spin open into obedient, receptive configurations on pure impulse, “ _... vain is the help of man…_ ”

“that’s nice,” Sans says tightly, grabbing your arms and starting to pull you gently but insistently towards the back of the boat.

“ _~Tra-la-la~ ... what’s **MY** name?... it doesn’t really matter..._ ”

The most unsettling thing is that there is no _song_. Neither the small songs of lilim, which might reveal that there is some subterfuge or mistake, nor the infinite and untouchable song of Above, as you heard so recently at the opened door.

There is nothing in the robe.

Except the Voice.

Sans crowds you to the very edge of the stern, both hands on your elbows, and turns his back to the robe. As he turns, you turn with him, and for a moment you see the empty hood fixed on you, before Sans spins you quickly around so that you are watching the river fade behind you instead. Your fingers curl anxiously in the hem of your sweater. Frisk, vibrating with confused concern, presses a warm pulse of mingled red and green out at you, but it tangles in your disturbed matrices without aligning.

“you’re ok,” Sans says into your ear, his phalanges brushing from your shoulders to your wrists in slow, soothing strokes, “just a creepy monster. you can handle creepy monsters, right? you walk around with a skeleton, and i’m way creepier than some cryptic gondolier. creepy’s no big deal.”

It is not a monster. It is not a monster, but you do not know how to tell him. You do not know how to put the words together, arrange them in your wheels and press them out through the vessel’s mouth where they will be useful, where he can hear them and understand and _run away_.

“nothing’s gonna happen. we’re gonna stand here, and then we’re gonna get to snowdin, and we’re gonna get off the boat, and you’re gonna be fine.”

It is not a monster, but it is the Voice of the Creator, the infinite Above, and you cannot understand how you are standing here, clothed in flesh and fallen, and how Sans is standing here, a lilit and nephil, and how neither of you has been sundered, unwritten, spoken out of existence by the One who forged you out of nothing and whose laws you have replaced with the smaller, kinder covenant of Frisk. You want to praise it, and obey it, and bask in it, and scream at it, and hide from it, and hide _him_ from it. And instead, because you do not know how to do all of those things, you do none of them.

“there’s nothing to be afraid of. even if there was, i’m not gonna let anything happen to you. you’re ok. saha? you’re ok. … i’m not gonna let you get hurt, ok? … i promise.”

It does not matter if you are hurt. You are a broken tool, a cast-off thing, judged unworthy and unfit for your place and thus removed from it. You are already hurt. What more can be done? You are unwritten? Then it is so. You were nothing once, and will be nothing again.

But you have Frisk, and they have given you a task, however little you want it. And you are afraid-- you admit it to yourself, staring at the sickly neon glare of pale orange spiking through your increasingly sharp angles, the unwelcoming slants and twists of your matrix even as your wheels offer compulsive, instinctive devotion-- for the monsters here. For the lilim-- for gentle Toriel, and your friend, and Napstablook-- and for Baraqiel’s children even more. The Creator descended into the Garden, once; placed a seed into a Daughter of Eve, once; but since these visits, there has been no interest from Above in being made manifest on the creation. You cannot understand.

Ineffable.

“see? made it all the way to snowdin and everything’s fine. you’re ok. just walk with me, saha, you’re ok. you don’t have to turn around. remember what i said? just gotta take the step.”

Sans’ hands nudge you gently forward. You focus, looking down, on the gap between the boat and the shore. The water, washing between these surfaces, frothing where it touches the solid wood and earth.

“ _~Tra-la-la~_...” the Voice muses, “ _... and the waters shall no more become a flood…_ ”

Sans’ phalanges tighten, slightly, on your shoulders, but all he says is, “everything’s fine. you’re ok. go ahead.”

You take the step.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ya'll I have been waiting four thousand years to do so many of these scenes.


	20. it doesn’t matter which you heard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _the taste is... indescribable_

You light upon a mountain and-- **one thoughts** \-- and the trees sway and creak, bending in waves around the focal point of your-- **more real, sahaquiel; like this, see** \-- empty presence.

~~Silver.~~

You follow the light.

**light is just light | love is just--**

L I G H T.

The light wraps delicate, porcelain-pale fingers around your-- your-- wrist?-- and guides you through--

a--

“almost there.”

You light upon a mountain and it _sinks_.

It is very dark.

_snap snap snap_

There is no light. You reflect nothing. You are empty.

O B E Y.

Gold.

Such simple things. So easily molded.

You break them in half. You pour out the substance. You move on.

 **LEAVE** , you command, and the upstart esh tastes the _nothing_ in you, knows the breath of _mortality_ , of dissolution, of the void that you were all born in and which Y O U S T I L L A R E--

**lovely mirror | lovely moon | do you like it?**

E R A S E.

Thou unmaker, thou pale rider, first and last, the final bell--

Something hums inside you, red and resolute--

~~_What’s wrong, why are you so upset, I don’t understand--_ ~~

You light upon a mountain, crowded with your fellows, chasing lost light.

You always follow the light.

Where is the serpent? Where is--

Something glides, sinuous and pale, through the cold black water of the sea, singing--

cradle songs--

saint’s steel--

 **no** \--

“you’re doing fine.”

You light upon a mountain and there is a b l a c k h o l e--

Where did **h e** go?--

you look

D O W N

and see:

who is that?

someone is climbing

and falling

red--

green--

blue--

 ~~silver~~ gold--

(integrity and--

satisfaction?

but--

where is the--?)

seven times

someone climbs

the mountain--

Why can’t you find **h i m**?

A knot of humming scales, curled in the protective curve of your ~~silver~~ wheels, prismatic, _glowing_ \--

 **NO** \--

someone climbs--

oh!

you have seen

this one

before!

~~_Is that… is that me?_ ~~

falling

and falling

how many times

will they fall

before

they stop

climbing?

red--

red--

red leaves--

**don’t forget to breathe | i know you can do it**

and you

F A L L

I N S I D E--

“ok, kiddo. time to wake up.”

**i love you | wake up**

_Wake up!_

You close your eyes.

You open your eyes.

Sans’ eye lights, bright pinpricks of mysterious radiance seated in the empty sockets of his skull-- stars, you think, abstractly; lights spinning in space, creating order out of chaos with nothing but their presence; _gravity_ \-- peer into your eyes closely. One of his hands tucks hair away from your face, then hesitates in midair. You study the china-white bones of his phalanges.

Unbidden, an archive unfolds in your matrix, those bones shearing open, blackness spilling out of cracks, his eye lights swallowed by _blue_ as the magic that holds him together-- dust hanging in _nothing_ , willed into shape by a soul that was cracked and fragile before you ever _spoke to him_ , and made it _worse_ \-- surrenders to the attention of the void and _eats him alive_ \--

“you ok?” he asks, touching the tips of his phalanges, feather-gentle, to the side of your face. As if you did not carelessly, casually, _hatefully_ kill him hours ago, with nothing but the terrible weight of your own name, in a time that no longer exists.

 _It’s okay…_ Frisk offers, but you do not need even need their hesitance, the uncertain way their warm, red presence does not reach out to you, to remember their disapproval, their anger, their long silence.

“Null,” you say, ducking your head down to avoid his gaze. He lets you. The hair falls back into your face.

“ok,” Sans says patiently, his phalanges tracing lightly down your shoulder before pulling away, “you want to stay with me, or you want me to leave you alone?”

You blink at your lap and realize, slowly-- you are so _slow_ \-- that the fabric curled over it is not just your sweater. It is orange, and warm, and draped across your shoulders like a shroud, the long trailing edges piled up over your knees. It contrasts horribly with the green couch cushion you are sitting on, but there is still something viscerally _good_ about it. About being wrapped in courage and upheld by kindness.

You have little of either.

You look up carefully through the veil of your hair, avoiding Sans’ eye lights.

It is the skeletons’ house.

You do not remember coming here.

 **?** you ask Frisk, wordless.

 _I don’t know,_ they say tensely, _I was with you. What was that?_

You pick at the edge of the blanket with your finger nails. You could find out how you came here. The moments from the river-- _the waters_ \-- to the couch are recorded in your archives, the same as any other moment. If you think about it you can even feel them, ready to unspool into your current instance, remove ambiguity, provide you with the facts and calculations of each step.

It seems, suddenly, like an unbearable burden.

 **Time** , you say instead.

Frisk vibrates with wordless, frustrated confusion. You do not know how to explain, not to a linear thing. Frisk might step backwards, fold time in on itself and touch a distant point on the thread, held and maintained, but there is the salient issue-- a _point_ on a _thread_. How do you explain, to a soul bound in linear constraints, what it is like to unmoor yourself from the layers of filtering and focus that construct order, something like linearity, out of the _limitless sea_ of time? To do that when you _are_ the filter, _and_ the sea. When you have, somewhere in you, a perfect record of everything that was, is, will be, neatly filed and categorized, just waiting for you pick it up and read it, already read it, will read it, will not read it, cannot read it, must, must not, pre, peri, post, inter, intra, mono, poly, omni.

How do you describe the failure of you to separate you from you?

Baraqiel said you had forgotten something.

Your archives shiver, scattering formless colors through your matrix like light splintered by a prism.

 **Flaw** , you conclude darkly.

“saha?”

You blink your focus back into the vessel, skating your eyes across Sans’ face without settling on any one feature.

You do not want to be alone again.

You hook your fingers in the collar of his coat, looking past him, into the other room. There are still little puddles of water on the tile, slowly evaporating. You can feel the line of his hidden clavicle beneath the curve of your fingers, smooth and cool and resonating, lightly, with his strange song, lightning remnants in his own minor key.

Did you replace his marrow with void when you killed him, or is that simply how Baraqiel made him-- hollow, and all the more fragile for it? If you closed your fingers around that slender bone and snapped it, would emptiness bleed into your palm before the dust? If you peeled him open, one rib at a time--

~~_snap snap snap_ ~~

No.

“ok,” Sans says, tilting his head into your field of view and trying to catch your eyes again. You look down to study the woven threads of the blanket. Each thread is a twist of smaller threads, soft and slightly fuzzy, tidy interlocking chains. “you wanna talk about what happened?”

No.

Words are too hard. You shake your head.

Sans sighs behind his teeth, clicking his phalanges against the arm of the couch. They make almost no noise on the fabric.

“tell you what,” he says, “i should check on pap and alphys anyway. betcha pap would show you some cool puzzles if you asked. wanna find out?”

You consider.

It does not take long.

You nod.

“cool,” says Sans, peeling your fingers off his collar. You fold them into the hem of his sleeve instead, and he gives you a look of exasperated affection that you do not, have never, cannot deserve.

He lets you cling to the edge of his sleeve, your curled knuckles brushing the inside of his metacarpals-- dangerous; doesn’t he remember what you are?-- as he leads you through the house, out into the snow, to a different door. You use your other hand to hold the edges of the orange blanket, pinned against your collarbone. It trails behind you in a loose, heavy arc, picking up static electricity on the carpet and sweeping a soft-edged trail in the snow. You find this satisfying. It makes you feel like your edges have expanded-- like you are less trapped.

“stairs,” he warns you, and opens the door.

You watch the stairs very carefully while you navigate the descent. Sans is very slow, so you are able to keep up with him and do not have to let go of his sleeve. This is also satisfying.

 _Huh,_ says Frisk, softly, _I didn’t even know they had a basement._

The room at the bottom of the stairs is small and blue, with a tiled floor-- you want to only step on the tile pieces and not on the grout between them; sometimes it is good that the vessel’s feet are small-- and several towering stacks of paper, and a counter with a device on it, and a _curtain_ that is _hiding something_. And it has the Great Papyrus in it. This is _very_ satisfying.

Sans shuffles into the room-- he steps on tiles _and_ on grout, for some reason-- and pulls you gently in his wake. You have to watch the floor carefully to step only in the right places. They do not click, and they are all the same color, so you do not think they are a puzzle. But it is still good.

“you’ve been busy,” says Sans. You glance up quickly through your hair, but he is not looking at you. He is looking at the stacks of paper.

Standing near the counter with the device there is a yellow lilit of _vaguely_ reptilian extraction. She is wearing a white coat that is too big for her. You wonder if the yellow lilit who is your friend is related to her. She waves one clawed hand at Sans without looking up, her tail slowly curling across the tiles, as she touches something inside the device.

The Great Papyrus is standing near her, holding a single sheet of paper, and staring at it with single-minded intensity.

“uh, bro?”

The Great Papyrus looks up. His eye sockets, narrowed, are fixed entirely on his brother, who shrinks slightly under his attention. You pick your way a few tiles closer to Sans, letting go of his sleeve to pull the blanket’s edges closer around you.

“FOUR THOUSAND,” begins the Great Papyrus. The yellow lilit looks up, startled, and whips her head around to stare at all of you. Sans makes a noise-- it does not sound like a good noise. You look at him questioningly, but he just pulls his hood up over his skull, held taut over his eye sockets with both hands, tense and miserable. “FIVE HUNDRED. EIGHTY. TWO.”

“wow,” says Sans, in a very small voice.

“P-Papyrus--” starts the yellow lilit, but she is watching Sans, her long face creased and her eyes pinched.

“DAYS,” concludes the Great Papyrus, his voice going _very high_ , flinging his sheet of paper into the air. As it flutters to the floor, you catch a glimpse of scratchy, loud math filling the page in neat columns.

“that’s. yeah,” mumbles Sans, his shoulders hitched high.

“WHY,” demands the Great Papyrus, his bones vibrating, “DID IT TAKE YOU TWELVE. _YEARS_. TO TELL ME.”

Sans makes a kind of strangled whining sound. You absolutely do not like it. This must stop immediately.

The Great Papyrus looks like he might say _something else_ , which the last several seconds suggests will only spur Sans to make _more_ bad noises.

You do not know what to do to make him stop.

You could unmake him.

Snap open his ribcage and find the hybrid soul hidden there. Unwrite the rules that keeps his bones connected. Whisper your name against his teeth and wait, patient as water, for him to unravel. You know so _many_ ways to kill. You are a _very good_ weapon.

It would be easy, efficient, and thorough. _Puzzle solved._

This is Baraqiel’s child, and Sans’ brother, and the Great Papyrus. You have obligations upon obligations, but if you looked-- ~~if you _tried_ , you coward~~\-- you could find a way to slip each leash. You are already ruined. What else can it cost you?

… but you do not want to.

Words?

Yes.

“Mm. Hhhh! No!” you shout, which is not your best effort, but words are hard and you do not want to take the chance that this will get worse before you find good ones.

The Great Papyrus blinks over at you, clearly startled, and does not say anything. So. Success!

You stand on your toes and reach up one hand to pat Sans gently on the top of his skull, through the hood. “Puzzle solved,” you tell him.

He makes a choked sound which you are reasonably certain is some stage of a laugh. It is a mild improvement, but still not entirely satisfactory. You pull irritably on his hood-- you need to see his face to assess his condition!-- and he lets it fall, his eye lights peeking at you sideways. His skull is in a soft and slightly unfocused configuration that you are not certain how to analyze, but which does not map to known distress. You suppose that this is adequate.

“good job not falling over,” he says wryly, _and curses you_ , so you immediately wobble. Toes are very unstable. You hold onto his shoulder as you replant yourself on the marginal improvement of the entire foot, and squint at him suspiciously.

His smile stretches, lazily, and his eye lights brighten. So it was probably intentional. You frown at him. He smiles _more_ , because he is the worst.

“UM,” says the Great Papyrus, “SANS? WHY IS THE HUMAN WITH YOU?”

“And why is it ad-adorable?” squeaks the yellow lilit, her face twisted up into an expression you are not sufficiently familiar with to identify.

“IT’S SMALL,” the Great Papyrus tells her archly, “LIKE SANS. OR YOU. OR CERTAIN DOGS THAT SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS AND ARE NOT ACTUALLY ADORABLE BUT ANOTHER WORD THAT BEGINS WITH ‘A’.”

“right. meet sahaquiel?” Sans’ eye lights flick sideways to glance at you. You blink at him until he stops. “technically not a human. technically inside a human. so, uh, also meet the human. frisk. they don’t talk. to us. pretty sure they talk to the angel.”

 _I **do** talk to you!_ Frisk says, which is redundant. You suspect that they are simply pleased to be acknowledged.

“W-wait, wait, wait,” says the yellow lilit, waving her hands to attract attention, “The _angel?_ ”

“uh,” says Sans, “this is gonna be a lot. maybe sit down.”

She gives him a very flat look. “ _Where,_ ” she says, witheringly, gesturing around the space at the lack of seating arrangements.

You decide that she is your new favourite.

* * *

“ _The_ angel,” Doctor Alphys says dimly, slumped against the side of the cabinets. The Great Papyrus clucks vaguely at her and finishes stacking the many pieces of paper that had been displaced when she slid down the surface during Sans’ recounting of events.

“Yes?” you confirm, cautiously.

“ _The angel_ ,” she hisses, burying her long face in her hands.

You look at Sans. He shrugs.

“WELL,” says the Great Papyrus, “I, FOR ONE, AM DELIGHTED TO MEET THE ANGEL! I _KNEW_ THIS WAS ALL A TERRIBLE MISUNDERSTANDING! FRIENDSHIP TRIUMPHS AGAIN!”

You change your mind. The Great Papyrus is still your favourite.

“HOWEVER,” he continues, and suddenly he is _much closer_ , staring down at you with his hands on his hips. You sway backwards a little trying to tilt your head far enough to see him, and Sans grabs your shoulder before you can tip over. “I WANT TO BE VERY CLEAR! THAT THERE WILL BE NO BROTHER-KILLING!!! IN THIS UNDERGROUND!!!!! OR FRIENDSHIP BRACELETS WILL BE REVOKED!!!!!!!”

“you, uh. you didn’t give them a friendship bracelet, bro,” says Sans. You glance sideways at him curiously. He seems mostly amused, and tolerant, and fond. This is how he always looks around the Great Papyrus, so it is not very instructive.

“YES. CONSEQUENTLY,” says the Great Papyrus darkly, “ALTERNATIVE DETERRENTS WILL HAVE BE EMPLOYED.”

Sans looks startled, but you lean forward to pat the Great Papyrus on one of his kneecaps. “Null harm lilim,” you explain, “Covenant of Frisk.”

He blinks at you, twice, and then nods sharply. “WONDERFUL! I’M GLAD WE CAME TO AN AGREEMENT! I AM, OF COURSE, A VERY SKILLED DIPLOMAT AND NEGOTIATOR!”

You nod agreeably. Sans huffs, amused, and shuffles around his brother to peer down at Doctor Alphys, talking quietly to her in a voice you cannot quite hear. The Great Papyrus follows his progress with slightly narrowed eye sockets. You pat his kneecap again, hitching the blanket tighter over your shoulders as you lean forward. He looks down at you obligingly, an expression of polite interest on his skull despite the tension clearly in his bones. It does not escape your attention that he is standing between you and Sans.

You could kill either of them-- _all of them_ \-- with equal ease. But it does not escape your attention.

“This?” You tap your vessel’s chest, then gesture at Sans, who has moved on to poking the device on the counter, peeking at Doctor Alphys sideways to see if she notices. She does not. “Watch. Safe. Null harm. Time harm? Stop time. This harm? Stop this.”

The Great Papyrus does not say anything. You wait.

“He Tries To Hide When He’s Hurt,” he says finally, approximately quietly. Sans’ head jerks up, but he does not turn towards his brother. “This Has Been Going On For Too Long. Something Has To Change.”

 _Something did,_ Frisk murmurs.

You remember something important.

You reach up to pull on the Great Papyrus’ glove. He hinges at the waist immediately, levelling his eye sockets with your eyes. You blink into them for a moment, startled.

“YES?” he prompts.

“Eat,” you tell him, tugging hopefully on his glove. “Sans. Now?”

Several things happen on his skull in very quick succession, and then he straightens, twisting his spine to pin Sans with a very unimpressed stare over his shoulder. “OH _REALLY_.”

“Spaghetti?” you suggest, optimistically. You hear Sans laugh nervously. You ignore it, because this is his own fault.

The Great Papyrus’s skull tilts down towards you, and his teeth part slightly, but for a long moment he says nothing. You squint up at him uncertainly.

The Great Papyrus’ teeth click together suddenly, and then he swoops down and picks you up, looping one arm under your knees and the other around your waist. The blanket loops down over his radius and ulna in slightly disarrayed tangles. You flinch, startled by both the suddenness of the action and the loss of control, grabbing nervously at the closest pauldron, your fingers clenching in his scarf, but the Great Papyrus just holds you close to his ribcage, still watching your face. You blink at his empty sockets. This is much closer than when you are standing.

“WELL! I DID PROMISE TO MAKE YOU PASTA ONCE YOU WERE CAPTURED!” says the Great Papyrus magnanimously, “AND LOOK! WOWIE! YOU’RE CAPTURED! I, THE GREAT PAPYRUS, HAVE CAPTURED YOU! NYEH HEH HEH!”

“uh,” says San, “we’ve kind of got… science to do, so--”

“IT CAN WAIT! UNTIL AFTER LUNCH!” says the Great Papyrus, marching to the stairs without putting you down. You look down and watch the tiles disappear under his long strides.

 _You_ want to be this height.

Also, you want the Great Papyrus to do all the stairs forever. It is _much_ faster, and he does not drop you.

“Good,” you tell him, unwinding your fingers from his scarf long enough to pat the side of his head once. His song, vibrating beneath your fingers, is less like yours than Sans' is, though you can still pick out fragments that remind you of Baraqiel, woven through his relentlessly upbeat, quick-moving strings and percussive snaps. He walks in step with his own song.

“THANK YOU,” says the Great Papyrus, beaming, “I PRIDE MYSELF ON EFFICIENCY!”

Sans and Doctor Alphys straggle into the house behind the Great Papyrus, but balk at the edge of the tiled room, Doctor Alphys wringing her claws while Sans squints up at you skeptically. You consider, staring down at him over the Great Papyrus’ shoulder. After a moment, you show him a thumbs up. His eye sockets round out again, his expression softening to amused tolerance, as Doctor Alphys chokes on a giggle and, for some reason, hides her eyes behind her hands, listing sideways to laugh into Sans’ shoulder. He tolerates this without comment.

Lilim are very strange.

The Great Papyrus puts you down, waiting patiently until you have your balance again and fussing with the arrangement of the blanket until it is satisfactorily symmetrical. Then he whips open the door of the fridge and starts collecting mysterious boxes, balancing the increasing tower in one gloved palm. Occasionally they wobble slightly, but they never fall.

“Puzzle?” you ask, observing.

The Great Papyrus looks at you without slowing down on collecting boxes from the fridge. He must have a very thorough inventory of the contents. You are not surprised.

“CONVENTIONALLY, NO,” he says, “COOKING IS AN ART! A PASSION! A _DUEL_!”

You consider this.

“Puzzle,” you conclude.

“WELL, YES,” he acknowledges, dropping the stack of boxes on the counter next to a device that reminds you of the microwave. You follow him across the tiles. “THERE IS A CERTAIN ARTISTRY TO PUZZLE CREATION! A PASSION IN THE SEARCH FOR A SOLUTION!!! A DUEL BETWEEN THE CREATOR AND THE SOLVER!!!!!!!!! CERTAINLY THERE ARE PARALLELS.”

You touch the box on the bottom of the stack delicately. “Solved.”

“YES! THAT IS ONE OF THE DISTINCTIONS! A PUZZLE SOLVED ONCE CANNOT BE SOLVED AGAIN! IT MUST BE REPLACED WITH A NEW PUZZLE TO PRESENT ANY CHALLENGE TO THE SOLVER!”

You nod. It is not as good to solve a puzzle when you already know the solution.

“HOWEVER! A PASTA ONCE COOKED _CAN_ BE COOKED AGAIN!” he explains, slamming a metal vessel on top of the device and flipping a box upside down over it. A brick of noodles falls into the pot with a clang. The Great Papyrus fishes the lid of the box out and pops it back onto the box, then places it neatly on the other side of the box stack.

 _I don’t think that’s right…_ Frisk says uncertainly.

“ADDITIONALLY,” the Great Papyrus continues, upending another box into the pot; this one oozes, “WHILE A PUZZLE IS DESIGNED TO BAMBOOZLE AND PERPLEX, A HOME-COOKED MEAL IS DESIGNED TO NOURISH! THESE PHILOSOPHIES AREN’T NECESSARILY OPPOSED, BUT THEY COME FROM DIFFERENT PLACES! HOLD THIS!”

He hands you a circle of metal with a handle on one of the faces. It looks like a shield. You hold it dutifully in front of you, although you have no idea what purpose you are intended to put it to. The Great Papyrus ducks into a cabinet beneath the counter, clattering, and emerges with a bone. It has teeth marks on one end.

“PUZZLEMENT MIGHT COME FROM A VARIETY OF IMPULSES,” he explains, gesturing with the bone slightly above your head, as he twists a knob on the device without looking at it. Flames materialize beneath the pot. You blink at them, bemused. “BRAVERY! PATIENCE! PERSEVERANCE! POSSIBLY EVEN INTEGRITY!”

He slams the bone into the pot and begins vigorously twirling it. You aren’t tall enough to see into the pot, but occasionally flecks of probably-spaghetti pop up into the air and splat back down into the pot. “COOKING, HOWEVER, MUST COME FROM LOVE! IT MUST BE _FULL_ OF LOVE! AND PASSION! AND PASSIONATE LOVE!”

“Green,” you muse, reaching out to touch the side of the pot.

The Great Papyrus abruptly switches the bone to his other hand, and reaches down to grab your wrist, preventing you from touching the pot. You wiggle your fingers. He moves your hand a little further away.

“AMONG OTHER THINGS,” he says. “KINDNESS ISN’T THE ONLY KIND OF LOVE. JUST THE EASIEST.”

You pull on your hand experimentally. He lets you take it back. You study it briefly, humming.

“Null green,” you tell him solemnly, tapping your vessel’s chest again.

“THEN YOU’LL HAVE TO FIND SOMETHING ELSE,” he says, patting you firmly on the head. “NOW PUT THE LID ON THE POT.”

You blink at him until he taps the metal circle-- not a shield, apparently-- and withdraws the stirring-bone from the pot. You reach up very carefully and drop it on top of the pot. It makes an unmusical clanging noise. The Great Papyrus nudges you away again and twists the dial. The flames jump up higher.

You watch them for a while, as the metal of the pot absorbs the heat and the probably-spaghetti inside makes wet, bubbling noises.

“YOU’RE FORGETTING BECAUSE REMEMBERING WOULD HURT,” the Great Papyrus says suddenly. When you flinch, blinking up at him, he is still watching the pot. “BUT LOVE DOESN’T CARE WHAT YOU DO TO IT. AND YOU WON’T BE YOURSELF AGAIN UNTIL YOU REMEMBER.”

Your wheels shiver, and you pull the edge of the blanket up over your head to hide under it.

“SIGH,” he says, “IT’LL BE ALRIGHT. THERE’S ALWAYS AN END.”

You do not know if you want an end.

“YOU SHOULD GO PLAY WITH SANS,” he says, patting you gently through the blanket, “LUNCH WILL BE READY SOON.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can you tell I was missing Papyrus? I was missing Papyrus. We all need more Papyrus in our lives.
> 
> Anyway, the opening of this chapter was a real balancing act between _obscure_ and SPOILERS, so it took four thousand years.  >>;


End file.
